Yup.

>Well, fair enough,
>given that (as you say) most of the value is not in the continued
>ownership and/or use of the thing, more the story of its acquisition
>and the images.

Put it this way. Today I finally got around to making a spreadsheet of everything in the little firearms museum I've more or less inadvertently been curating for the last 20-odd years. I compiled it out of a couple of old-fashioned notebooks I'd been manually keeping track of this stuff in for a couple of years now, having come belatedly but sincerely to the understanding that record-keeping is important in these matters.

Being written on paper, the notebooks included records of guns I no longer have, and a couple of times, rediscovering them and adding them to the "former" tab in the spreadsheet, I've felt stabs of significant angst. The most painful was the Browning Hi-Power I got for Christmas from my grandfather when I was in high school, which was pretty much the only Actually Valuable Thing I owned at more than one point in my life, and which I had to sell during the really lean times a few years ago. I will always, always reproach myself for that, even though I didn't feel I really had a choice at the time.

I bought another one a while ago, that's the one that appeared in the Hi-Power Gun of the Week, and it's virtually identical to the one I sold. In fact it could be argued to be somewhat superior, since it has at least one improved feature (an ambidextrous safety lever), and since the original one—despite being very rarely used and coddled whenever it was—had taken to malfunctioning for no reason I could ever diagnose. But it's not the same. It'll always be not the same. Maybe if I'd bought one with some history instead of a brand new one—a British-Canadian one by Inglis, say, or one of the ones made by FN when they picked themselves up and resumed commercial production after the war—it'd be different, but the one I have, I could sell tomorrow and regret nothing but the monetary loss I'd be taking. It's just a gun.

The 416 was like that right from the start. It was a good joke, the startlingly strange gun I ended up with because I didn't pay close enough attention to the product description, but once it was told there wasn't a lot of point in hanging onto it. I liked it, on some level I appreciate that such weird things exist, but then I appreciate that those minesweeping tanks with the chain flails on them exist too, I don't need to have one. I don't buy these things as investments, so there wasn't even the vague prospect that it might someday appreciate in value.

The punch line there is that it evidently did appreciate in value, and based on the asking price they had on the Circuit Judge, I ended up making about $50 on the deal. :)

>I think it's safe to say you're not about to take up
>shadowrunning for real...

Even if I did, the only thing an HK-416 pistol would enable me to do is flatten light ammo against body armor faster than ever before. (Or actually not even, since it's semi-auto and I could accomplish the same effect with my Ruger. :)

>(I still think you're right, that there should totally be a blaster
>that looks like that.)

Oh, I'm sure there is. And with their eye toward the nostalgia market, BlasTech has probably given it a designation that deliberately winks toward its resemblance to earlier products—DL-4400, perhaps.

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