Hemingway’s Guns– new edition

Silvio Calabi and Co. hav come out with a new ed of the already- good Hemingways’s Guns that adds the Cuban guns from the Finca Vigia (a uniformly ruined unshootable lot BTW) to the already good scholarship of the first volume. Two things are  particularly notable. First, most American rich folks back then shot good …

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The Gun Kids take a Road Trip

..To Cody. Nathaniel Fitch and Arthur Wilderson with Cody curator  Ashley Hlebinsky. Arthur writes: “We took this picture in one of the basement vaults-within-a-vault at the Buffalo Bill Museum of the West in Cody, WY.  Nathaniel managed to get us in with a few phone calls.  The lady in front is Ashley Hlebinsky, the curator …

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Lever Gun Legacy

People from cities who hunt once a year think they must have he latest flat- shooting magnum to achieve success. So, often they miss because of an unexpected flinch, or end up destroying meat. Third gen ranchers like Miles City’s John L Moore (well, that is the nearest TOWN) know better: “My dad was a …

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A Little Place Marker

Plenty of material, madly busy, but this image, courtesy of John L Moore, will stand, as truth, as a testimonial to my old rifles, and to  my vanity that my hair is growing back, if not quite here yet. At least I can go out now without a hat…

Got it!

The Mauser C96 “Broomhandle” automatic pistol– if anything I own is “iconic”, it is. I have wanted one for many years. I will add Arthur Wilderson’s excellent short essay when he sends it, but it was the gun of Churchill at Omdurman and Lawrence of Arabia; Walter “Karamojo” Bell supposedly shot down a German fighter …

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A little on 4 Bores

We know little about the “ten- plus” bores in America, but in England they still build them. The always- innovative Michael Louca of Watson brothers builds them as Best- quality sidelock ejectors– not just for collectors either, though he admits his over twenty pound, 42 inch plus barrel model is mostly a collectors item. He …

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“A simple linear gesture..”

LC Smith Field Grade Featherweight– an honest Yankee double, finished. Nothing has cleaner lines. This 6 1/4 pound, 28″ 12 bore from, probably, the twenties, is a perfcctly balanced gun.

Pedersen Rifle

But for  the preferences of General MacArthur and a big supply of WWI Springfields, we might have had a more elegant, if complicated, rifle for WWII than the Garand. Nathaniel F, gunblogger, scholar, and expert on military weapons and their history, first showed me a cartridge for the legendary Pedersen when he visited with Arthur …

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Malcolm dissents

Malcolm Brooks, author of Painted Horses and a capital- F Friend of Q, was so appalled by an Adam Gopnik anti- gun rant in the New Yorker that he wrote the furious and sometimes even funny riposte below. Turns out he was “baited” with an old essay, but the truth remains. Apparently no one at …

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