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Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
Gryphon
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20880 posts |
Jan-26-16, 05:23 PM (EST) |
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"Gun of the Week: Colt 1903 Pocket Hammerless"
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This week, a little pistol with a pretty big backstory: the Colt 1903 Pocket Hammerless. 
1903 was a busy year for John Moses Browning, who had recently ended his long working relationship with the Winchester company and started seeking other takers for his services. Given that he was the world's leading firearms designer at the time, it is perhaps not surprising that he found them. In that one year, no fewer than three handguns he designed entered production, two in the United States and one in Belgium. One, the .38 ACP Colt 1903 Pocket Hammer, ultimately proved less popular and was withdrawn from production in only a few years (although some time later, a larger pistol that looked quite a lot like it did achieve some measure of notoriety when it was selected as the United States armed forces' new sidearm). The other two were based on the same design, but at different scales and for different calibers, and both would go on to be popular and well-remembered. The European version was produced by Fabrique Nationale in Belgium and sold initially as the FN Browning Modèle de Guerre (Browning War Model), but in time became known simply as the FN Model 1903. They were popular on the civilian market and were also adopted as police and military sidearms by such diverse clients as Sweden, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire (modern-day Turkey). It used a cartridge called 9x20mmSR (semi-rimmed) or 9mm Browning Long, which was eventually made obsolete by the widespread popularity of 9x19mm Parabellum, but that's a different story. The American model, like the Pocket Hammer (so called because it had an external hammer mechanism, not as some kind of cute marketing riff on how powerful and portable it was), was produced and sold by what was then still called Colt's Patent Fire Arms Company of Hartford, Connecticut. Browning had worked with Colt for some time, having designed their Models 1900 and 1902 pistols (which were, like the 1903 Pocket Hammer, precursors of the eventual M1911 military pistol), and the 1903 Pocket Hammerless was his entry into the then-popular pocket pistol category. It was essentially a scaled-down version of the design that became the FN Model 1903, and it used the smaller .32 ACP cartridge. 
I've mentioned .32 ACP before, and you can be reasonably sure it will turn up again in Gun of the Week; it was once, and for a long time, the go-to cartridge for small automatics in both the US and Europe (where, as previously noted, it was called 7.65x17mm). Browning originally designed it in 1898 for what became the FN Model 1900, his first handgun design for them (and, in what would become a trend, not to be confused with the Colt Model 1900, which was also Browning's work but which was a markedly different gun in .38 ACP). It quickly caught on, and before long pretty much anyone who was making small auto pistols was making them in .32/7.65mm. And not just for the civilian market—if you got shot by a policeman in western Europe between about 1905 and 1975, chances are it was with a .32 automatic. The thing that is attractive about .32 ACP to a gun designer is that it's near the high boundary of cartridges that can safely be used in a simple blowback semiauto design, but powerful enough to be reasonably effective at close ranges, which puts it in a "sweet spot" for use in compact handguns intended for self-defense. A blowback design is one that doesn't have a mechanically locked breech; instead, a combination of spring tension from the recoil spring and the simple inertia of the slide keep the action from opening before the bullet has left the barrel and the pressure in the chamber has dropped to a safe level for extraction. If the action of a semiauto opens prematurely, while chamber pressures are still unsafely high, lots of unpleasant things can happen. Ideally, you want the cartridge case to be extracted and ejected intact and in a tidy manner, not blown out so violently that it deforms or ruptures outright. This is why, for instance, plain blowback pistols in 9mm Parabellum generally don't work out; to keep that from happening, they have to be so heavy and/or have such stiff springs that operating them becomes a hassle. The 1903 Pocket Hammerless is an interesting design, because it's so clearly a transitional design. Browning was in the middle of what, if he had been a musical composer, musicologists would probably call his "handgun cycle" at the time, and the 1903 PHL shows evidence both of refinements made and of details that are not quite there yet. A first thing to note: unlike virtually all modern semiautomatic pistols, the 1903 PHL doesn't lock open when you've fired the last round in the magazine. This was a thing that had been done by 1903; the Mauser C96, so called because it debuted in 1896, did so. However, the C96 had a fixed internal magazine that was fed by stripper clip from above (as with many rifles of the period; see the Gun of the Week files on the SMLE and Mosin-Nagant for examples), so it had to lock open in order to be reloaded. The Colt 1903 PHL has a detachable box magazine (it holds eight rounds, by the way), and it evidently hadn't occurred to Browning yet that locking the slide open for reloading could also be a useful convenience feature in that case as well. Thus, if you haven't been keeping count, your first indication that you're out is when it goes click. However, he did include a way to lock the slide open by hand if desired; as you can see in the photo below, the safety lever also engages a notch in the slide, and conveniently, two such notches are provided, one to lock it closed and one to lock it open. 
Another somewhat questionable feature of this piece from a modern standpoint is the way its trigger mechanism works. Once the chamber has been loaded, there's no way of uncocking the firing mechanism without actually firing, and that safety lever is too small and basic to provide any real sense of security, at least to me. It does work, engaging the safety locks the trigger so that the gun can't be fired, but no mechanical safety is 100% reliable, and that lever just doesn't feel positive enough to give me confidence in it. I carried this pistol on a regular basis for a couple of years,* and because of that shortcoming I always carried it with a loaded magazine but the chamber empty (that's Condition III for you tactical jargon buffs). I figured the extra half-second or so it would take to make ready to fire was worth the massive reduction in probability of a negligent discharge. Modern pistols have much more involved safety systems, often with multiple redundancies. (I should note at this point that the 1903 PHL also has multiple safeties—you can see in the top photos that it has a grip safety. That protruding bit on the back of the grip is spring-loaded and must be depressed, theoretically by the shooter having a firm and proper hold on the pistol, before it will fire. Grip safeties were popular features for a while in the early 20th century, and Browning used them on many of his designs, including the famed M1911, but they went out of fashion—in large part because they could go wrong the other way, and leave the shooter unable to fire when it was really, seriously wanted.) Further details are probably best shown by taking it apart. In order to disassemble this item, you have to (once you've made certain the gun isn't loaded, of course!) position the slide at a specific point along its line of travel, which is helpfully indicated by this mark engraved on the right side: 
This is where it ends up if you lock it open using the safety. A trifle inconveniently, that is not quite far enough back to actually start the disassembly. To get it there requires a slightly odd bit of maneuvering, which involves holding the gun in such a way that you can move the slide and frame independently with the same hand. This is a little tricky to figure out, but since it's a blowback .32, the spring tension is such that it's fairly easy to do once you've worked out where to put your hand. Once you've done that, you can rotate the barrel 90°, which disengages a set of lugs on its underside from slots machined in the frame (we'll see this in later photos). Now that the barrel is unlocked from the frame, the slide will come forward past its usual rest position and completely off the front of the frame, bringing the recoil spring and its guide with it: 
From here, the spring and guide can easily be removed from the slide, and then the barrel comes out with a bit of finagling. 
This is one of the areas where the 1903 PHL's design is both refined and yet not entirely finished. On the one hand, it's a very elegant design mechanically. Field-stripped in this fashion, including the magazine, it breaks down into all of five parts (six if you count the recoil spring and its guide rod separately, but you never need to take them apart). Obviously there are a bunch more pieces inside the frame, where all the trigger lockwork and whatnot is, but that stuff isn't really "user serviceable" as such. It's certainly not meant to be disassembled for cleaning, which is what field stripping like this is really meant to facilitate. There are no screws to undo, no pins that need to be punched out, no small parts easily lost. On the other hand, that slide-slightly-farther-back-than-locked, rotate-the-barrel-just-so business is pretty fiddly, and not easily documented. I've read the user's manual for this pistol several times, but I couldn't really figure out how the hell the takedown worked until I just started fooling around with it. Once you get it apart, it becomes fairly obvious how it all works, but from the outside, there's very little indication beyond that one positioning mark of what you're supposed to do, or how much. Now that we've got it apart, let's take a closer look at a couple of features. First, now that the slide is no longer in the way, an examination of the frame reveals something interesting. Despite its trademarked name, the Colt 1903 Pocket Hammerless pistol... 
... is hammer-fired. It's only called "Hammerless" because you can't see the hammer when the pistol is assembled, nor interact with it directly as part of the user interface. It's completely contained within the back of the slide, so that it can't snag on things. Back in those days, when manufacturers marketed something as a pocket pistol, they meant it literally. Inside-the-belt holsters and all that fancy concealed carry rigging you find today hadn't been invented yet, and if he didn't rock a shoulder holster like a film detective, the armed gentleman-about-town was expected to tuck his pistol into an actual pocket, probably in his coat or overcoat. A better look at the hammer is afforded by letting it down into the "fired" position: 
Note that doing this is a bit of a hassle, because before you can put the gun back together again it has to be recocked, and the gun isn't designed for you to do that by hand. Another common feature of early-20th-century pocket pistols is that they tended to have almost laughably rudimentary sights. This was, again, so that there would be less to snag on pocket lips and whatnot, but also because they weren't really considered necessary. It was expected that the average gunfight one of these things would be involved in, should the owner of such a pistol be unfortunate enough to find himself so embroiled, would be conducted at pretty much point-blank range. That thing guys do in old gangster movies where they hold their pistols at their sides, well out of their own line of sight, is not just a Hollywood thing, people really did that. (Without a lot of training, this practice worked about as well as you would expect, which is why it's no longer a thing. Old West gunslingers did a similar thing, which is why it was called firing from the hip, but they practiced enough that they could actually make it work. At least the ones who lived long enough to develop reputations did.) At any rate, you can see from the pictures at the top that the 1903 PHL at least has sights, which puts it ahead of more than a few of its competitors from the period. They're quite small, though, and hard to pick up against an even slightly busy background. Again, not considered important at the time. Nowadays we know better. While we're checking out internal features, let's have a closer look at that barrel retention system and the fiddling around that goes into making it work. In the shot below, you get a good view of the lugs machined into the underside of the barrel. 
Note, also, that the way the cutout for the barrel in the front of the slide is shaped, the barrel will only come all the way out when it's in this position, that is, rotated with the retention lugs fully to the bottom—the position it's in when the pistol is assembled. Here's a shot of the matching slots machined into the frame: 
Therefore, in order to disengage the barrel from those lugs, it must be rotated 90°, but then to remove it from the slide, you must rotate it back to its original position. This is relatively easy to do once the slide is off the frame and there's no spring tension on anything, but it's not very intuitive. There is a cutout on the inside of the slide to make way for the lugs to rotate. 
Since the barrel remains fixed relative to the slide until the lugs are unlocked, the slide has to be positioned just so in order to make that cutout available, which is why the little dance with the marking on the side is necessary. I've put it partially back together with the barrel rotated into that cutout so you can hopefully get a better idea of how it works. 
Reassembling the pistol also requires a bit of headscratching the first time, because it is not a straight-up reversal of disassembly. The intuitive thing to do, since barrel, slide, and recoil spring all come off as a single assembly— 
—is to try to put them back on that way as well. The problem with that is that the free end of the recoil spring has to fit into a guide hole in the frame, which is hidden inside the shroud at the front... 
... and you can't see to align it if you've re-engaged the slide with its rails on the frame, so you can end up missing the hole and kinking the spring, which is obviously not good for the spring, and it won't go fully back together that way anyway. What you actually have to do, then, is put the spring's free end into that hole on the frame first. 
Then you can engage the frame and slide rails, and you have enough room to aim the guide-rod end of the spring into its channel at the front of the frame as you bring them together. 
Once that's done, you repeat the sleight of hand required to get the slide into the right relative position to rotate the barrel, re-engaging it with its retention lugs on the frame, at which point you can let the slide come forward under spring pressure again and reassembly is complete. (You'll know if you missed because the slide will just pop off the front of the frame again if the barrel isn't locked.) Somewhat unintuitive takedown aside, this is an elegantly designed and very functional pistol. They were popular with civilians, police, military officers, and criminals alike. John Dillinger had one on him when he finally came a cropper in 1934. They have few moving parts and are plenty robust enough for the cartridge they use—robust enough that a same-size version could be produced in 1908 in .380 ACP (not to be confused with .38 ACP, which is longer). Between them, the 1903 and 1908 Pocket Hammerless pistols remained in production until the end of World War II, and some were still being issued to US Army and Air Force general officers into the 1970s. According to the bounteous data available on these from The Internets, mine was made in 1919, which makes it a "Type III" in terms of revisions to its markings. You can see from the left side photo that, although the patent dates are still specified, it no longer says "Browning's Patent" as the earliest ones did, and the markings are in a very plain block typeface. Still later revisions would introduce the familiar gold Colt medallions on the grip panels and tinker around further with the wording of the inscriptions (note the Continental spelling of "calibre" on the right side of mine. This gun has a fairly prominent role in one corner of UF; "gun Valkyrie" Gunnr Brynjelfr gives young Anne Cross an enchanted 1903 .32 Pocket Hammerless from her personal collection in S4M3 On the Road Again, and it turns up routinely in Anne's appearances thereafter. There's also mention of one in Warrior's Legacy, as having been the pistol Gryphon carried on "spy jobs" until it met with an unfortunate accident off-screen and was replaced by a Makarov. (If I were writing that story today, the replacement would probably be a CZ 82.) There's also a mildly interesting side story attached to the one in my own collection. I bought it in the late '90s, after moving back to the East Coast from California, at a shooting range in Monson, Massachusetts, east of Springfield. I didn't have a firearms permit in Massachusetts, though, so I was never actually able to take it home with me; it stayed at the range where I bought it until I moved back to Maine a few years later, at which point I had to pay them to ship it to a licensed dealer up here and then go pick it up. That's not the interesting part, though. The interesting part is that the range in Monson was in a building that had once been part of a private school, Monson Academy, until the school merged with one over in Wilbraham in the early '70s. The campus, right bang in downtown Monson, had then been repurposed as mixed commercial space, and Down Range (as it was called) was in the basement of the building that had been the gymnasium. A little while ago, as I was copying my collection records over to a new notebook, I ran across the original display tag for the Hammerless, which stayed with it while it lived at the range and was included when they shipped it to Maine. Stapled to it is a corner cut out of one of their invoices, which someone had written the address of the shop in Maine on the back of, and which showed most of their own address on the front. Out of idle curiosity I ran it by Google to see if the range was still in business... ... and discovered to my surprise that not only was it not, the building is no longer there. It was destroyed by, of all things, a tornado in 2011. OK, bit of a shaggy dog story, but I think it's interesting. Or at least I found it surprising. Gun shops and shooting ranges go out of business all the time, like any sort of small business, but rarely does one find that a place where one used to hang out in central Massachusetts has been leveled by a tornado since one was last there. Next week, we'll look at a much later piece of Mr. Browning's work and do a little comparing and contrasting. --G.
* If you're really curious, we can talk about why I don't any more, but I didn't want to go into it in the main post, since it's not really about this or any specific gun.
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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
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Sofaspud
Member since Apr-7-06
333 posts |
Jan-27-16, 01:22 PM (EST) |
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1. "RE: Gun of the Week: Colt 1903 Pocket Hammerless"
In response to message #0
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LAST EDITED ON Jan-27-16 AT 01:22 PM (EST)
>This week, a little pistol with a pretty big backstory: the Colt 1903
>Pocket Hammerless. This is one of my favorite handguns of all time, and I can't even explain why. By all accounts I shouldn't like it; the grip is too small for my gargantuan meathooks, as you've noted the (lack of) sights are problematic, I've never cared for Colt's trigger guard styling... but for some reason I've just always loved the way these little guys look. >This gun has a fairly prominent role in one corner of UF; "gun
>Valkyrie" Gunnr Brynjelfr gives young Anne Cross an enchanted 1903 .32
>Pocket Hammerless from her personal collection in S4M3 And made me say "Oooh, nice!" out loud when I was first reading that piece. Because, well, see above re: favorite guns.
>and it turns up routinely in Anne's appearances
>thereafter. There's also mention of one in Warrior's Legacy,
>as having been the pistol Gryphon carried on "spy jobs" until it met
>with an unfortunate accident off-screen and was replaced by a Makarov.
Which is on my list of pretty guns, but I've never had the pleasure of encountering one in person so I dunno if it's got the right 'feel' to it or not. ('Right' being completely subjective, of course.) Appearance-wise, the thing that I like about Makarovs is that they look like a pistol version of a German-engineered automobile: precise and clean, without the flamboyant stylings of, say, Ferrari, or the aggressive stance of an American muscle car. Which is funny, I think, because the Makarovs are Russian and Russian cars are... not pleasing to look at? But some of their guns, they did right.
> (If I were writing that story today, the replacement would probably
>be a CZ 82.)
I'm curious as to your reasoning. Just personal preference, or...? (The only thing coming to mind offhand is the CZ 82 is ambidextrous whereas the Makarov is not, so left-handed WL!Gryphon might find it more convenient.)
>Next week, we'll look at a much later piece of Mr. Browning's work and
>do a little comparing and contrasting.
And now I'm stuck being all curious about what you're going to pull out next. You are a tease, sir.
>--G.
>* If you're really curious, we can talk about why I
>don't any more, but I didn't want to go into it in the main post,
>since it's not really about this or any specific gun.
I must admit I *am* curious. I've got my own reasons for not carrying, most of which can be traced directly back to my family history of military and LEO types, but I admit I'm a weird duck in that regard since I know quite a few others who have similar family traditions and are... enthusiastic, I suppose, about carrying. Anyway, if you feel like expounding on your reasons further, I'd be interested. --sofaspud
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Gryphon
Charter Member
20880 posts |
Jan-27-16, 04:33 PM (EST) |
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2. "Why I Stopped Carrying (And Why I Started)"
In response to message #1
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LAST EDITED ON Jan-27-16 AT 04:38 PM (EST)
>>This week, a little pistol with a pretty big backstory: the Colt 1903
>>Pocket Hammerless.
>
>This is one of my favorite handguns of all time, and I can't even
>explain why. By all accounts I shouldn't like it; the grip is too
>small for my gargantuan meathooks, as you've noted the (lack of)
>sights are problematic, I've never cared for Colt's trigger guard
>styling... but for some reason I've just always loved the way these
>little guys look. Browning had a pretty good eye for that sort of thing. Some of his earlier handguns are a bit odd-looking, proportion-wise (the Colt Model 1900 looks like the slightly weird long-slide version of a better-proportioned gun that wasn't actually made, for instance), but many of his pistols are very handsome, and most of his long arms are quite beautiful, if you're into that kind of thing. I used to have a Remington Model 8, which is a very fine-looking item indeed, especially when you consider that it was the first commercial medium-power self-loading rifle. First attempts at anything are usually all function and no form, but the Model 8 is kind of art. (I don't have one any more because the one I bought turned out to be unsafe to shoot, which would've been fine if I'd known that and paid accordingly, but since I didn't, it went back. Another one is on my list to track down someday.) >Appearance-wise, the thing that I like about Makarovs is that they
>look like a pistol version of a German-engineered automobile: precise
>and clean, without the flamboyant stylings of, say, Ferrari, or the
>aggressive stance of an American muscle car. Heh, you say that, and then the first German sports car I think of is the Audi R8, with those ridiculous Christmas lights around the headlights. :) But I take your point. >Which is funny, I think, because the Makarovs are Russian and Russian
>cars are... not pleasing to look at? Now, now. The 1950s GAZ and ZIL limousines were fine-looking automobiles if you liked them big and showy. But then they were copies of mid-'50s Packards, so. :) >> (If I were writing that story today, the replacement would probably
>>be a CZ 82.)
>
>I'm curious as to your reasoning. Just personal preference, or...?
>
>(The only thing coming to mind offhand is the CZ 82 is ambidextrous
>whereas the Makarov is not, so left-handed WL!Gryphon might find it
>more convenient.) Well, I've owned both (which I hadn't at the time I wrote that scene), and partly because of that and partly just in general, I find I like the Czech's ergo better. I'm not the biggest fan of the 9x18mm cartridge they both use, actually—I find its recoil kind of unpleasantly "snappy", something to do with the pressure curve, I suspect—but if I was going to use one on a regular basis, I'd prefer the 82. >>Next week, we'll look at a much later piece of Mr. Browning's work and
>>do a little comparing and contrasting.
>
>And now I'm stuck being all curious about what you're going to pull
>out next. You are a tease, sir. Well, there's no need to keep you in suspense; I wasn't deliberately trying to be coy. It's the Hi-Power (aka P35, GP35, L9A1, Inglis Mk I, etc.). >>* If you're really curious, we can talk about why I
>>don't any more, but I didn't want to go into it in the main post,
>>since it's not really about this or any specific gun.
>
>I must admit I *am* curious. OK, fair warning, all—this gets into the politics and/or psychology of firearms ownership and whatnot, more than I usually tend to do around here, 'cause if you've been paying any attention to the news out of the USA lately you'll know that this is a Big Ole Can of Worms. But I did offer, so here goes. I got my concealed firearms license in 2003 or 4, while I was working at the newspaper here in the little (at the time in the process of becoming-)ex-mill town in Maine where I live. I did this for a number of reasons. One was, well, just because I could; I had recently come back from a 10-year stretch living in Massachusetts and California, two of the harder states in the Union to be a civilian shooter in, and it was a novelty to be back in a place where that kind of thing isn't automatically regarded with Official Suspicion. (Well, suspicion is probably too strong a word, but one is... generally not made to feel welcome, let's call it, in those jurisdictions.) Another, and the one uppermost in my mind at the time, was that this part of the world seemed like it had become a more dangerous place since I left. I'm not going to insult anyone who lives in an actual Bad Neighborhood and say that rural Maine is one, but all the same, the state had (and continues to have) staggering rates of drug and alcohol addiction, and fairly endemic levels of the various other sorts of crime that come along with them. With the paper industry all but dead, only one shoe company left in the state, and the high-tech sector mostly responding "lol wut?" to Maine's efforts to attract its interest (apart from a couple of big semiconductor plants in Portland), a lot of people in these parts are strapped and more or less desperate, and have been for some time now. This is hardly unique to Maine—all of post-industrial America has gone or is going through it—but the crisis was just starting to take on a recognizable and unencouraging arc when, coincidentally, I started covering the local news. At the time, the recurring theme was people being robbed of their prescription meds (this was at the height of the big OxyContin craze, if that's the right word, among opioid addicts), with side orders of domestic violence, random outbursts, and generally what Anthony Burgess would have called "the old ultra-violence." All this kind of came to a head with the paper when my then-editor managed to piss off both the Town Council and the leadership of the (then not-quite-defunct) paper mill's biggest union, and through them a fairly large percentage of the town's aforementioned strapped-and-desperate contingent—this was more to do with his raw personal charisma than his reportage, but nevertheless, we started getting threatening notes at the office, and a couple of folks told Mr. Editor that "you and your people" should, I believe the phrase was, "watch yourselves after dark." I doubted I was personally on that list, if there even really was one—unlike that editor, who was the central-casting carpetbagger in this scenario, I'd lived here as a kid and virtually all of these guys knew and liked my father from the glory days in the mill—but nevertheless, tempers were fraying and the overall vibe in the Magic City was getting pretty nasty, so I decided, Well, OK then, and looked through my collection of mostly-antiques for the least unsuitable carry piece I had. That turned out to be the Hammerless. Anyway. Long-winded setup, but I think the details are probably important here. At any rate, I carried the Hammerless fairly regularly for the rest of my time on the paper, and a couple of years after it folded (er, as it were)... and then one day, when I came home and took it off, I looked at it and I just thought, What the fuck am I doing? Seriously? This is where it gets a little complicated, because a lot of the conditions described above hadn't really changed. Yeah, I no longer worked for a paper that was receiving threats of violence to its staff, but if anything, the town is actually worse off now that the mill has been not just closed, but torn down and sold for scrap. People can no longer even pretend the Jobs Fairy is going to come and make everything right again, like they could when it was at least still there. The OxyCodone thing has largely died down... for the somewhat surprising and not at all reassuring reason that most of Maine's opiate addicts seem to have gone back to heroin. Oh, and crystal meth is up lately. It's like a stock market, only for illicit drugs. I also haven't changed my mind as to whether private citizens should be licensed to carry firearms. Note that I said "licensed". I've never been one of these people you read about who think people should just be allowed, or even obliged, to carry them, willy-nilly. I have zero philosophical or Constitutional problems with the idea that a person ought to have to demonstrate a baseline level of competence and... what would you call it, societal trustworthiness... before he or she can hide a device enabling lethal action at a distance upon his or her person and walk around in public. In fact, I think it's quite a good idea. No, basically what changed was, I did a realistic re-evaluation of my own capabilities—what I know about how I respond to stress, my level of training, and whatnot—and decided that I'm not sufficiently competent to be doing that. Don't get me wrong, I'm a prudent and competent shooter. I've never been thrown off a firing range for Doing Something Stupid, nor injured or come close to injuring myself or anyone else in the course of handling a firearm. I don't have children, nor are there any who have reason ever to be in my house, but I still keep my handguns and ammunition locked up, because it's the right thing to do. I do not believe the public was, in any measurable way, endangered by my having carried a pistol around for a few years. But, well, me in a gunfight? Forget about it. So there's no point, because that's the only reason, besides pigheadedness, that a private citizen would carry a concealed handgun: in case the stars align in such a way that he or she has the misfortune to find him or herself involved in a gunfight. It's the old Good Guy with a Gun premise and, unlike a lot of the rhetoric, most of the time I believe it's sincerely meant when people espouse it. And, well, at my current level of training and knowing what I know about how I handle above-normal-pressure situations, I'm pretty sure I would be at best no help at all, and at worst a liability, as an armed participant on an occasion like that. I'm a competent shooter and a decent shot, but I'm not a Tactical Guy. In a situation like that, I'd be like an ordinary private pilot trying to engage in a dogfight. That sort of thing doesn't generally end well for anyone. So I... retired, more or less, from regular carry. I keep my permit current, partly on principle and partly because you never know, but the Hammerless stays in the drawer. TL;DR—I realized I wouldn't be any damn good in a gunfight and decided to stop being Walter Mitty. --G.
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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
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Sofaspud
Member since Apr-7-06
333 posts |
Jan-27-16, 07:34 PM (EST) |
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4. "RE: Why I Stopped Carrying (And Why I Started)"
In response to message #2
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>Browning had a pretty good eye for that sort of thing. Some of his
>earlier handguns are a bit odd-looking, proportion-wise (the Colt
>Model 1900 looks like the slightly weird long-slide version of a
>better-proportioned gun that wasn't actually made, for instance), but
>many of his pistols are very handsome, This is true! I don't like how the designs feel* in my hand, but they're beautiful to look at. (* the M1911 being an exception, for some reason. Too bangy for my tastes for a regular shooter but damn if it doesn't feel nice in the hand.)
>Heh, you say that, and then the first German sports car I think of is
>the Audi R8, with those ridiculous Christmas lights around the
>headlights. :) But I take your point.
Well, I was thinking more like the Audi A6... :)
>
>Well, there's no need to keep you in suspense; I wasn't deliberately
>trying to be coy. It's the Hi-Power (aka P35, GP35, L9A1, Inglis Mk
>I, etc.).
Ha! I had said to myself "I bet it's a Hi-Power", and bam. :) Which, I mean, look, it's like *the* gun people think of when you say "Browning". Even if the M1911 is more popular, most folks think that's "Colt", not "Browning". Looking forward to it. The Hi-Power is one of the ones that do fit my hand properly (and the last one I fired was a joy, responsive and accurate), but I don't particularly find them visually appealing. They're not ugly, they're just in the "meh" category for me, appearance-wise. >OK, fair warning, all—this gets into the politics and/or psychology
>of firearms ownership and whatnot, more than I usually tend to do
>around here, 'cause if you've been paying any attention to the news
>out of the USA lately you'll know that this is a Big Ole Can of Worms.
> But I did offer, so here goes. I like to think we can have a discussion round these parts without dipping into said can. As long as you keep your crypto-lesbian subtext out of it, I mean. :)
>I got my concealed firearms license in 2003 or 4, while I was working
>at the newspaper here in the little (at the time in the process of
>becoming-)ex-mill town in Maine where I live. I did this for a number
>of reasons.
>
>One was, well, just because I could; I had recently come back
>from a 10-year stretch living in Massachusetts and California, two of
>the harder states in the Union to be a civilian shooter in, and it was
>a novelty to be back in a place where that kind of thing isn't
>automatically regarded with Official Suspicion.
Whereas my shooting career (so to speak) began in Arizona and continued in Utah and Washington, all of which are ... let's say they're on the friendly side. Arizona especially. I mean, wow. The TLDR version is haha-not-really-joking summed up as "If you can carry it, you can carry it." Concealed carry is fairly well-regulated there, but there wasn't much in the way of limits* on open-carry items. (* while I was living there, anyway; presumably it's changed but I suspect it hasn't changed much)
>All this kind of came to a head with the paper when my then-editor
>managed to piss off both the Town Council and the leadership of
>the (then not-quite-defunct) paper mill's biggest union, and through
>them a fairly large percentage of the town's aforementioned
>strapped-and-desperate contingent—this was more to do with his raw
>personal charisma than his reportage, but nevertheless, we started
>getting threatening notes at the office, and a couple of folks told
>Mr. Editor that "you and your people" should, I believe the phrase
>was, "watch yourselves after dark."
This sounds like a story! And, to steal a phrase, you magnificent bastard, I read your book! ... I don't think this was in it, though. :) >Anyway. Long-winded setup, but I think the details are probably
>important here. At any rate, I carried the Hammerless fairly
>regularly for the rest of my time on the paper, and a couple of years
>after it folded (er, as it were)... and then one day, when I came home
>and took it off, I looked at it and I just thought,
>
>What the fuck am I doing? Seriously? Without intending to suggest that one is inherently right or wrong (carry vs. non-carry), I really wish more owners would ask themselves this. Even if I don't personally agree with their decision (whichever way they go), I would feel better about it if I knew they'd thought about it this deeply. (More on this later.)
>I have zero philosophical or Constitutional problems
>with the idea that a person ought to have to demonstrate a baseline
>level of competence and... what would you call it, societal
>trustworthiness... before he or she can hide a device enabling lethal
>action at a distance upon his or her person and walk around in public.
> In fact, I think it's quite a good idea.
I think this, in broad strokes, is what a CCW permit is supposed to entail. Some jurisdictions do it better than others. The ... debate is too nice a word, but the debate surrounding guns, in the US at least, seems to me to ignore, or at best marginalize, the folks who choose to carry responsibly in this fashion. All you hear about are either the nuts yammering about full-auto or the headcases who shoot up public places. Or the jerks who want to Make A Statement and open-carry everywhere. (I'm a bit bitter about that last group in particular because there's been a spate of them in my area recently, taunting the cops and swinging their dicks around. I'm not pro-police, I'm pro-don't-be-a-dick.) Makes it really hard to enjoy a hobby.
>No, basically what changed was, I did a realistic re-evaluation of my
>own capabilities—what I know about how I respond to stress, my level
>of training, and whatnot—and decided that I'm not
>sufficiently competent to be doing that.
Just for having done that, I'd be more comfortable with you carrying than with a lot of folks. (My opinion and a buck-fiddy will get you a cup of coffee, but for what it's worth and all.) >But, well, me in a gunfight? Forget about it. So there's no point,
>because that's the only reason, besides pigheadedness, that a
>private citizen would carry a concealed handgun: in case the stars
>align in such a way that he or she has the misfortune to find him or
>herself involved in a gunfight. It's the old Good Guy with a Gun
>premise and, unlike a lot of the rhetoric, most of the time I believe
>it's sincerely meant when people espouse it. I think you're right that it's sincere, but I get the feeling that most have not done the sort of rational self-analysis you describe above. Which is unfortunate. For me, I've taught rifle safety and been a surrogate rangemaster I dunno how many times. As kinda hinted at with the family history, there's a lot of experience there that I was able to draw on when I was learning how to use firearms. And for some damfool reason, both my wife and I seem to have a knack for being on-scene in crisis situations. In the past year alone, one or both of us have been there, or first responders to: an old dude getting the crap beaten out of him by a punk with a skateboard, a gas station robbery (with shots fired), a three-car pileup with injuries where I ended up directing traffic until the cops got there (and then after, when the cop determined he was too busy and I was unlikely to get myself run over, gee, thanks), and I dunno how many other minor incidents. It's a curse, I swear. And in the past, back in my Misspent Youth, I've had guns pulled on me twice and been shot at once. It's not fun. Anyway! Point is, I know how I react in stress situations, and I'm safe with firearms; I have no doubt that I could carry safely. But I don't think I should. From what I've seen... guns rarely de-escalate a situation. I think it's usually the opposite, in fact. I get the impression that a lot -- maybe not most, definitely not all, but a goodly chunk -- of CCW holders carry because they see themselves as the heroic type. "If bad shit happens, I can be prepared!" (to save the day). That's a wonderful thing for fiction, but it doesn't translate to the real world all that well. I guess what it is, is that when such a situation arises, I'm hoping the CCW person is thinking "Damn, I hope no one gets hurt" rather than "Damn, I better drop that bad guy". (Or worse: "Finally! Here's my chance!") And I don't know which I'd be. I know which I'd rather be! ... but I don't know, and don't want to run the risk of finding out it's the wrong one. --sofaspud
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Gryphon
Charter Member
20880 posts |
Jan-27-16, 10:55 PM (EST) |
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5. "RE: Why I Stopped Carrying (And Why I Started)"
In response to message #4
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LAST EDITED ON Jan-27-16 AT 10:58 PM (EST)
>>Heh, you say that, and then the first German sports car I think of is
>>the Audi R8, with those ridiculous Christmas lights around the
>>headlights. :) But I take your point.
>
>Well, I was thinking more like the Audi A6... :) If I had to pick a German-made performance car and money was no object, I'd probably go looking for a late-production Porsche 928. Or possibly a... I've forgotten what they're called, the less showy-offy replacement for the AMG SLS. The 928 is a handsome beast. Nicely understated. >Which, I mean, look, it's like *the* gun people think of when you say
>"Browning". Even if the M1911 is more popular, most folks think
>that's "Colt", not "Browning". If you're talking about handguns, most likely. Longarms fanciers will probably think of the Auto-5 shotgun first. >Looking forward to it. The Hi-Power is one of the ones that do fit my
>hand properly (and the last one I fired was a joy, responsive and
>accurate), but I don't particularly find them visually appealing.
>They're not ugly, they're just in the "meh" category for me,
>appearance-wise. Well, it partially depends on which Hi-Power you're talking about; there have been a lot of variations. The latter-day attempts to Tactical It Up with synthetic grips and whatnot are all a bit sad, but the original version has a certain chunky elegance to it. I particularly like the "shoulder" toward the front of the slide, it adds a nice kinda-deco touch. Still, this is all quite subjective, I freely grant that. Some people think Glocks are good-looking! Those people probably should not be encouraged to own firearms, given their obvious visual impairments, but don't go by me. :) >Whereas my shooting career (so to speak) began in Arizona and
>continued in Utah and Washington, all of which are ... let's say
>they're on the friendly side.
>
>Arizona especially. I mean, wow. The TLDR version is
>haha-not-really-joking summed up as "If you can carry it, you can
>carry it." Concealed carry is fairly well-regulated there, but there
>wasn't much in the way of limits* on open-carry items. Yeah, Maine has always had open carry, but I'm not sure I've ever actually seen a civilian doing it, except for hunters. Also, a bit vexingly, the Legislature passed a law last year removing the requirement for a license to carry concealed. You can still get one if you want (a lot of people think they did away with them entirely, which is not the case), but the only practical difference is that if you're carrying without a license, you have to tell the cops first thing during any conversation you may end up in with them, whereas if you DO have one, you don't have to tell them unless they ask. Which is... weird. It also, and it's alarming to me how many people don't appear to realize this, changes nothing about where you can and can't legally be armed. Courthouses, schools, etc., still off-limits, licensed or not. I've already seen a couple reports of blocks of Samsonite who assumed that because they didn't have a license, it meant they could do more than someone who had gone through the process. I mean... really? Sigh. >I think this, in broad strokes, is what a CCW permit is supposed to
>entail. Some jurisdictions do it better than others. The ... debate
>is too nice a word, but the debate surrounding guns, in the US at
>least, seems to me to ignore, or at best marginalize, the folks who
>choose to carry responsibly in this fashion. Well, this is 2016 in America. Is there a middle ground left in any public difference of opinion any more? It doesn't feel like it to me, most days. >Or the jerks who want to Make A Statement and
>open-carry everywhere.
>
>(I'm a bit bitter about that last group in particular because there's
>been a spate of them in my area recently, taunting the cops and
>swinging their dicks around. I'm not pro-police, I'm
>pro-don't-be-a-dick.)
>
>Makes it really hard to enjoy a hobby. Yeah. Exactly. Every time there's An Incident, and people say "y'know, maybe we ought to do something about this," and the NRA et al. double down yet again on their NO EVERYTHING IS FINE AND EVEN IF IT WASN'T YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO CHANGE ANYTHING ANYWAY SO I'M DONE TALKING TO YOU routine, I just want to hide. Because I fully believe that all that accomplishes is to turn the people whose basic attitude was "well, it's not my thing, but live and let live, right" away from that stance and more toward "fuck me, these people are all foamy-mouthed maniacs, they shouldn't be allowed to have tableware, let alone weapons." They're constantly retrenching into an ever-less-tenable position with ever greater vehemence, and it's my biggest worry (in this particular context, I mean, I have lots of others) that when they do finally go down they're going to take all of us decent, inoffensive, law-abiding, non-people-killing shooters with them. (And more and more, it seems like that's what a lot of those guys want, because they don't consider us Real Gun People anyway.) At the very least, their antics are going to make life harder for those of us who want to play by the rules, because that almost guarantees there will be more of them than there otherwise would've been. That's what happens when you refuse to compromise, or even consider compromising, and force a showdown, and then—as will inevitably happen someday—lose. Phew. That was a bit of a soapbox derby, wasn't it. Moving on. >I think you're right that it's sincere, but I get the feeling that
>most have not done the sort of rational self-analysis you describe
>above. Which is unfortunate. Yeah. And it makes me nervous. Whenever I'm someplace where it seems like there's the possibility of Things Going Wrong (which admittedly is not that often nowadays), my first thought isn't to try and predict who might start something; before that, I find myself looking around and thinking, All right, if something does kick off in here, which of these guys is the goddamn cowboy? >Anyway! Point is, I know how I react in stress situations, and I'm
>safe with firearms; I have no doubt that I could carry safely.
>But I don't think I should.
>
>From what I've seen... guns rarely de-escalate a situation. Well, they certainly aren't likely to calm anybody down, that's for sure. >I guess what it is, is that when such a situation arises, I'm hoping
>the CCW person is thinking "Damn, I hope no one gets hurt" rather than
>"Damn, I better drop that bad guy". (Or worse: "Finally! Here's my
>chance!") Mm. Makes me think of something I read about the time that guy shot his congresswoman (Gabrielle Giffords, IIRC, is her name) at the meet-n-greet in Arizona. The way I saw it reported, there was a CCW holder in that crowd, but he was way at the back or something. Whatever the details, he didn't have a shot, and he knew if he drew, he'd accomplish nothing other than make himself a target for the cops, who could not reasonably be expected to know his IFF status. So he didn't, and when it came out afterward that he was there he got nine miles of shit from the If I'd'a Been There I'd'a Wasted That Punk crowd. No, fuck you, guys, he's Doing It Right and you're not. The thing about tactical situations is that you have to use tactics. That guy did. I'm not so sure I would, so... yeah. --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
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rwpikul
Member since Jun-22-03
209 posts |
Jan-28-16, 11:09 AM (EST) |
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9. "RE: Why I Stopped Carrying (And Why I Started)"
In response to message #5
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>Mm. Makes me think of something I read about the time that guy shot
>his congresswoman (Gabrielle Giffords, IIRC, is her name) at the
>meet-n-greet in Arizona. The way I saw it reported, there was a CCW
>holder in that crowd, but he was way at the back or something.
>Whatever the details, he didn't have a shot, and he knew if he drew,
>he'd accomplish nothing other than make himself a target for the cops,
>who could not reasonably be expected to know his IFF status. So he
>didn't, and when it came out afterward that he was there he got nine
>miles of shit from the If I'd'a Been There I'd'a Wasted That Punk
>crowd. No, fuck you, guys, he's Doing It Right and you're not. The
>thing about tactical situations is that you have to use
>tactics. That guy did. I'm not so sure I would, so... yeah. The CCW guy actually did have a shot but chose not to take it because he couldn't be sure if the guy with the gun was the shooter or not. Good thing too: While it was the gun used in the attack, the guy holding it was the man who had disarmed the shooter.
--
Chakat Firepaw - Inventor & Scientist (Mad) |
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Gryphon
Charter Member
20880 posts |
Jan-29-16, 08:44 PM (EST) |
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12. "RE: Why I Stopped Carrying (And Why I Started)"
In response to message #9
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>The CCW guy actually did have a shot but chose not to take it because
>he couldn't be sure if the guy with the gun was the shooter or not.
>
>Good thing too: While it was the gun used in the attack, the guy
>holding it was the man who had disarmed the shooter. (nod) OK, either I got hold of a wrong account, remembered it wrong, or—most likely, I think—conflated a couple of different incidents. It's still a case of the guy Doing It Right; and both scenarios speak to the same point, which is that you've got to think quickly in situations like that, and I'm not sufficiently convinced that I would. --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
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rwpikul
Member since Jun-22-03
209 posts |
Jan-28-16, 11:06 AM (EST) |
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8. "RE: Why I Stopped Carrying (And Why I Started)"
In response to message #2
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>All this kind of came to a head with the paper when my then-editor
>managed to piss off both the Town Council and the leadership of
>the (then not-quite-defunct) paper mill's biggest union, and through
>them a fairly large percentage of the town's aforementioned
>strapped-and-desperate contingent—this was more to do with his raw
>personal charisma than his reportage, but nevertheless, we started
>getting threatening notes at the office, and a couple of folks told
>Mr. Editor that "you and your people" should, I believe the phrase
>was, "watch yourselves after dark." IOW, you nicely slotted into the situation where I actually think getting/carrying a gun "for safety" is at least a reasonable idea: You had a specific threat that you had to deal with. >It's the old Good Guy with a Gun
>premise and, unlike a lot of the rhetoric, most of the time I believe
>it's sincerely meant when people espouse it. They certainly believe it, they're generally wrong but at least they are honestly wrong. (For each attempted defensive gun use in the US, there are about 10 accidental shootings and 100 guns stolen.)
--
Chakat Firepaw - Inventor & Scientist (Mad) |
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zojojojo
Charter Member
621 posts |
Jan-28-16, 11:07 PM (EST) |
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11. "RE: Gun of the Week: Colt 1903 Pocket Hammerless"
In response to message #1
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>Appearance-wise, the thing that I like about Makarovs is that they
>look like a pistol version of a German-engineered automobile: precise
>and clean, without the flamboyant stylings of, say, Ferrari, or the
>aggressive stance of an American muscle car.
>
>Which is funny, I think, because the Makarovs are Russian and Russian
>cars are... not pleasing to look at? But some of their guns, they did
>right. this may be the first (and only?) time in history that a russian-built *anything* was favorably compared to a german car, considering that russian builds tend to be assembled by (to all appearances) a bunch of drunks with meathooks for hands for operation and maintnance by under-educated drunks with meathooks for hands... -Z
my dad was an engineer in a russian foundry. if he hadn't looked in the form, one of the laborers would have been a very permanent part of a particular casting... he was passed out drunk at the bottom (the laborer, not my dad). ---
Remember kids: guns make you stupid, duct tape makes you smart. |
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Gryphon
Charter Member
20880 posts |
Jan-27-16, 11:14 PM (EST) |
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7. "RE: Gun of the Week: Colt 1903 Pocket Hammerless"
In response to message #6
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>Interestingly, this attempt at gun restoration popped up around the
>Internet: Oh yeah, that's another Browning design (in some of the later photos you can see some similarities of the internal design, such as the barrel retention lugs), though it's a much smaller gun. The Vest Pocket automatics were .25-caliber, and despite the name I think they were mainly marketed to ladies as handbag guns. (Also sold in Europe as the FN Model 1905/1906, depending on the regional market.) Interestingly, despite not having Hammerless in their trade name, they actually were hammerless (striker-fired, you can see the striker in one of the disassembly photos there), unlike the Pocket Hammerless, which, as we have seen, was not hammerless. Ah, marketing. :) As to whether it's fully reparable, he seems to be making pretty good progress, though he may hit a wall when it comes to some of the smaller internal components. He probably won't be able to make any use of the original springs, for instance, and I don't know offhand how readily available replacement spring sets for those guns are. It wouldn't surprise me too much if you could still get them someplace, though. --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
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RE: Gun of the Week: Colt 1903 Pocket Hammerless
Why I Stopped Carrying (And Why I Started)