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.
-><-
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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