Non-Monday

Well, we missed the snow but it's a bit nippy this AM. I spent the weekend tryng to sleep off the Permanent Virus, without as much luck as I'd hoped. I'd go to the doctor, but I hate to get that, "keep warm; drink plenty of liquids, blah blah" for a couple of hundred bucks.


Since I felt too generally crappy to stage an expedition to the bookstores in Boulder, I've been catching up on books I've been meaning to read. Last night I was working through Brownson Malsch's biography of Texas Ranger "Lone Wolf" Gonzaullas when I came across a photograph (on Page 48) of Lone Wolf's shotgun, a cut-down Browning Auto 5 (okay, maybe a Remington Model 11, the first autoloading shotgun in America...hard to tell from the picture...J. M. Browning designed the thing for FN, who licensed it to Remington, I think) with a hand-tooled leather cover for the stock and, pause for effect, a "silencer." I looked for the picture on the Internet, but couldn't find it...the can is really small, maybe 6-inches long and only slightly larger in diameter than the barrel.

It brought to mind the whole controversy around Javier Bardem's silenced Beretta 390 (at least, that's what the book says) in No Country for Old Men.

The more I look at the Gonzaullas picture, the more convinced I am that it's not a silencer, but a modified Cutts Compensator, like this WW2 Remington Model 11:

One could hacksaw off the front "nipple" on the Cutts and still get some effect from the Compensator, I suppose. The barrel on Lone Wolf's gun looks to be about 14 inches, maybe a bit longer, with the comp. For close in work, it makes since to lop off the nipple on the Cutts, since you'd be going for spread rather than pattern.

Why this should matter to anyone in the entire world, I have no idea.

BTW, I just ordered a Mesa Tactical saddle rail/shelholder for my Serbu Super Shorty 870, my thinking being, "Oh, why not?" Maybe I can win the Tactical Tommy Overwrought Accessory of the Month contest!