...is, I suppose, not to shop! In between food and long, long bouts of sleeping, we did manage to get to the hardware store to buy a replacement shelf and the yarn store for my Sweetie, the World's Fastest Knitter, to pick out an autumn project. While she was sifting through yarn, one of the store owners took the time to explain and show how a spinning wheel works, which turned out to be pretty fascinating...I've always imagined tat wool became yarn through some process that involved a wand and mumbled words of incantation. Next time my Sweeter buys yarn we're going to go for "Instructing Stupid Boyfriend on Basic Loom."
Some catch-up stuff from Taurus and Rossi...remember this year's SHOT SHOW and the briefly shown Trail Judge. a .410 mare's leg style pistol-ly thing based on the new Rossi Rio Grande lever gun platform, which features a side-eject like a Marlin? My cherubs and seraphim told me that there were some big potential issues on the gun's importability, since it skated along the edges of ATF's definition of a short-barreled shotgun (SBS). In late March Rossi
confirmed to DRTV that a .410 version of the Trail Judge would not be produced.
Good news (especially for us "exotic" gun fans)...a .410
and .45 Colt version of the Trail Judge has, I was told in Brazil, met ATF muster and will be imported. I was told the new gun would run both .410s and .45s mixed in the mag tube...the version I handled had a screw-in choke as well as the rifled barrel.
No doubt one of these babies will be coming to the Secret Hidden Bunker ASAP. And, no, it's not "tactical!"
I think the
Rio Grande versions in 45/70 and the one in .410 have potential good-sized markets in the United States. We've done
SHOOTING GALLERY episodes on using a lever gun for self-defense and we made a big point then of the 45/70 versions as pure-D stompers. We used Marlns,ch have been in short supply lately, but since those episodes we've seen the return of the Winchester 1886 in several flavors and now the Rossi. I keep a lever gun around the house — a Marlin .44 Magnum — but a 45/70 would be a welcome upgrade. Up here at the Secret Hidden Bunker, I love the various larger-teethed fauna, but if I have to shoot one I'd plan to shoot it a lot.
I am apparently one of the few people on earth (except of course for the huge number of actual paying customer for such guns) who thinks the .410 is something more than a .22 Short in a larger package. Years ago we used to recommend the .410 (usually in the pump version) as a self-defense tool in a couple of situations — urban locations, especially cardboard-walled apartments, where penetration absolutely had to be controlled, or for people who had legitimate issuers with recoil (injuries, age, fill in the blank). Back then we were of the opinion that various and sundry miscreants would not be willing to stand in front of a hailstorm of pellets or buckshot, even if that hailstorm was coming from a lowly .410.
Of course, that was before we had predictive models for "stopping power." Let's see...which model are we on now? Oh yeah, penetration! Which has superseded speed, expansion, cross-sectional area of bullet, and probably a few others I've forgotten. Okay, enough snark...predictive models are indeed useful, but it is important to remember that
the map is not the trail.
There is, I believe, a huge psychological element to gunshots...obviously, predictive models can't address such issues. But there's an old saw something to the effect that we tend to measure what we
can measure, then because we can measure something we assign that something a greater value than factors harder to measure. I keep coming back to the necessity for multiple shots to guarantee the aggressor stops aggressing.
And I come back to the words of the great Walt Rauch, an occasional commentator here and a person who has forgotten more about these topics than I will ever know: "
No one wants to leak."
