Got a note from Glock this AM that K.C. Eusebio will be joining Team GLOCK...good for Glock and good for K.C.! You've seen him many times on SHOOTING GALLERY, and you no doubt will be seeing him many more times. He is a great guy and one of the most brilliant shooters I've ever seen. Now, if I could just get him to stop calling me, "Mr. Bane!"
And speaking of Gary Paul Johnson (as we were Monday), he has an excellent article in AMERICAN RIFLEMAN on the "Fitz Special," the cut-down big bore revolvers made by John Henry FitzGerald when he was at Colt in the early years of the 20th Century. As a kid I was absolutely enamored with the Fitz Specials and, as a consequence, am probably going to hell for carving up 1917 Colts and S&Ws back when they were cheap and readily available. Gary mentioned the iconic Fitz Special, the Colt that Fitz made for Col. Rex Applegate. Back in 2005 I was lucky enough to be able to handle that gun extensively. Here's my report from Back Then.
I still have the custom S&W 1917 I snagged back then. It's not a Fitz Special...note its unaltered trigger guard, but it is a superb implementation of the big bore belly gun.
My S&W belly gun is a good example of why I wish guns could talk (we wish that all the time on GUN STORIES). Somebody put a lot of money into building this little blaster...the barrel's been correctly restamped with the caliber perfectly reentered, the action is superb, the sight are dead-on for 230 grain ball and the gun came with a set of Roy Fishpaw custom grips numbered to the gun (yeah, I put those grips on my S&W M-21 .44 Special). Then it ended up in my local gun store for about a quarter of what it was worth. Wonder howcum...
Of course I also have several other big bore belly guns, including a wonderful 3-inch .44 Magnum built by Jim Stroh at Alpha Precision. It's been my off-and-on car gun for years. Talk about the Golden Age of Handguns! Back in Fitz' day, it was a big deal to make one of these mini-blasters...now they're readily available, from the Charter Arms Bulldog .44 Special to a whole slew of S&Ws (I especially like the 329 and 325 Night Guard series, which I believe are very true to the Fitz concept) to the bruising Ruger Alaskan, the perfect big bore belly gun for defense against, say, garbage trucks. I would so love to see Colt do a retro Fitz!
One other thing this AM...This morning's New York Red Star...er...Times ran an op-ed on a meme we've seen before...over and over and over...a variation on "I'm a gun owner but I hate hate hate the NRA!" Today's flavor is "I'm a New Hunter and I Have Guns but I Hate the NRA!!!"
I’m a hunter and a sportswoman. I own guns, but not for self-defense. I support gun control laws. I would happily vote to repeal the Stand Your Ground law in my home state of Oregon. In other words, the N.R.A. does not represent me.Where do they find these dweebs? Do they run an ad in the Dweeb Weekly News..."if you're a gun owner and you've never given the slightest though how it is that you're still able to own and use guns after 4 decades of brutal antigun propaganda, misstatements, outright lies, confiscatory legislation and a demonization campaign second to none, give us a call! We'd like to publish your story!"
The writer, Lily Raff McCaulou, notes that for real hunters like herself, "it's not about the gun." Well, it damn well should be, Ms. McCaulou, unless you fancy hunting with stone-tipped spears and burning branch.
3 comments:
While I don't always agree with everything the NRA does, I still support them as they have the muscle to protect freedoms which I deeply care about. I do this in the same way people who have strong political party affiliations don't always agree with everything that their party does, yet they still support them unwaveringly due to the polarization in the opposing points of view.
What hunters like this author don't understand is that the anti-gun crowd has vowed to try to eliminate ALL civilian gun ownership through a slow but steady implementation of "common sense" gun laws that inch by inch, slowly and almost imperceptibly erode the rights we have until one day, there are none left. The "hunter friendly" rifles and shotguns she so cherishes are no less on the anti-gunner's prohibition radar than any other firearm they don't like. They have tried to divide the gun owning population before by saying that "your hunting guns are OK, it's only the other ones used for self-defense or target shooting that we want to ban". The problem for them is that we are onto them and we know what their game is, as we have caught them in that lie time and time again. They cleverly say "nobody needs a high-powered rifle for target shooting", or " nobody needs this or that cosmetic feature on a firearm for hunting" to try to chip away at the available choices. Slowly but surely, sooner or later, they get far enough down the list of guns they ban for this or that reason that they feel emboldened to ban guns outright, like Chicago's now-repealed complete handgun ban. They call it "death by a thousand cuts", and we don't like their endgame.
The NRA can certainly test one's patience at times when they do something stupid or over the top, but I'm willing to accept the warts as long as they keep fighting like a mad dog to protect my rights and freedoms. The other side is no less creative and aggressive in their efforts to disarm us completely. It's a shame that hunters like the author of the article can't understand that.
I too was fascinated by the custom Fitz Colt revolvers when I was a kid! Here's a link to the one I had made up recently: http://www.coltforum.com/forums/colt-revolvers/40433-custom-fitzed-colt-engraved.html
I went "whole hog" with it by having the trigger guard cut and then having the gun engraved!
"I would so love to see Colt do a retro Fitz!"
The 2009 Greg Martin auction of the Colt collection included a prototype of "Fitz Special" - so marked on the barrel - blue Detective Special. The only FitzGerald feature was a bobbed hammer.
It would be wonderful if Colt could make a DA revolver again. We can hope.
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