And now we break for just a
wee bit o' nonsense...
There are very real reasons for a doomsteader to own guns, and a
number of firearms that are of practical utility.
There are also a lot of guns on the market which are essentially
range toys and conversation pieces. And that's okay! Nothing wrong
with buying a gun just because it's awesome looking and fun to
shoot.
'MERICA!
But many of preppers confuse the playthings with essential tools,
which can be a problem if the latter are neglected in favor of the
former.
Keep in-mind that
"impractical" is not the same thing as
"useless". You can certainly shoot game or a bad guy with a
novelty gun. But there are better, usually cheaper weapons that put
you at less of a handicap.
The Mare's Laig.
The poster child for Hollywood contrived guns, from the heyday of
TV westerns, when producers made their protagonists stand-out by
giving them distinctive weapons. Bounty hunter Josh Randall of
Wanted
Dead or Alive carried a big-loop Winchester lever-action
rifle that had been cut down at both the barrel and stock so that it
could be used as a sidearm.
In reality, this is a pointless gun. The handgun-level
44-40
Winchester cartridge, fired out of shortened barrel, would
have been slightly inferior to the typical
.45 Colt revolver
in power, and no better in accuracy. The Winchester uses a tubular
magazine, which gets cut down along with the barrel. This leaves
the Mare's Laig with the same capacity as a six-shooter. All in an
excessively heavy gun with an obnoxious overall length that takes
two hands to use, with a higher probability of malfunction and
slower rate of fire than what all the other horse-opera guys were
shooting!
To be fair,
Wanted Dead or Alive didn't even try
to pretend this was a particularly good weapon. In the first
episode, Josh Randall found himself at a noticeable disadvantage
trying to work the lever from a prone position, then managed to hit
a physically unimposing adversary (none other than the future Little
Joe!) with a round that didn't take him off his horse or prevent his
escape.
Yet, due to it's badass appearance and association with Steve
McQueen, who played Josh, and whose picture was in 1960s and 70s
dictionaries next to the word
"cool", people still love the
Mare's Laig.
Getting one used to be a problem, since cutting down a rifle
makes it subject to registration and taxation under the federal
National Firearms Act, which most people don't want to mess
with. But it finally occurred to someone that a Mare's Laig
manufactured as such from the start (rather than being modified from
a rifle) would technically be just a handgun, not restricted by the
NFA. New manufacture Mare's Laig (
Ranch Hand, Mare's Leg)
pistols are widely available at this writing.
AK/AR "Pistols".
So, if we can get away with selling a cut-down 19th Century
lever-action rifle as a handgun, why not do the same with modern,
semi-auto rifles?
Building the
AR-15 and
AK-47 with short barrels
and no shoulder stocks has become a popular way to get around the
NFA. Of course, you loose considerable of power and accuracy with
the short barrel. These weapons are bulky and poorly balanced if
you actually try to shoot them like pistols, and awkward to hold and
sight rifle-style without a stock. A more conventional pistol in
9mm
+P with a 33 round extended magazine would be handier, and
would have the advantage of being a normal, holster-friendly sidearm
when you switch back to a 17 round mag.
Now there are new, adjustable 'wrist braces' (wink-wink) on the
market that make these AK/AR shorties a little more shootable. But,
if you need something that fires rifle rounds, a 16" barrel is
already pretty handy. Seems like the main purpose of these guns is
to say "up yours" to the
bATFe...
Which is pretty good justification, come to think of it.
Pistol Grip Shotguns.
Shotguns had stocks long before 1934, when the Feds started
regulating this sort of thing. And for good reasons... The stock
helps you manage recoil, acts as a spacer to put your eyes in
alignment with the sights, and gives you a more stable hold on the
gun for accurate shooting.
Replacing the stock with a pistol grip throws all that away in
exchange for making the shotgun compact enough for... What? Hiding
under your coat on the way to a mob hit?
"A great truck gun!" I've heard some say about stockless
shotguns (as well as Mare's Laigs and AK/AR pistols). But what does
that mean? If it's a gun you carry in your truck, why would it need
to be truncated? Trucks have lots of room, and don't get tired from
carrying a full-weight shotgun. If it means you're gonna shoot it
from inside the truck, an awkward, two-hand weapon is a poor choice.
"Home defense!" Really? Shotguns are indeed the obvious
go-to for home defense, but how does lack of a stock help you there?
There's this notion that shotguns produce a wall of devastation,
so you don't really need to aim them. But shot patterns are
actually pretty small at defensive range, even with a short barrel.
It is quite possible to miss, especially when you are just pointing,
rather than properly aiming.
Mossberg has figured out how to exploit loopholes in the law in
order to produce a 14" barrel shotgun (er-
"firearm") with a
pistol grip that avoids NFA regulation. I'm half-tempted to get one
myself, just because it looks badass and I like the rule-bending
aspect. But, if there's real shotgun work to be done, I'd leave the
novelty gun alone and grab my full stock
12 gauge!
Gimmick Shotguns.
I remember watching the old
Looney Tunes and
thinking that Elmer Fudd had a heck of a shotgun, as it appeared to
be a double-barreled, pump-action, semiautomatic, with a huge
magazine capacity!
Well, modern manufacturers aren't content to leave Elmer's gun in
the realm of cartoons. They're selling dual-tube magazine shotguns
for umpteen round capacity, pump-action double barrels (rack once,
shoot twice),
Assault Rifle derived semiautomatics that can
be fed from a big drum with dozens of rounds, and more.
Tacti-cool as these scatterguns are, they are complex in design
and function, which reduces reliability. And they are expensive.
As in, you could buy multiple
Mossberg 500 or
Remington
870 tried-and-true shotguns for what one of these things
costs, and have change enough left over for a steamer trunk of
shells.
A long sequence of blasting away nonstop with a shotgun is a
'Going
Out In A Blaze Of Glory' climax scene in a zombie apocalypse
movie. The half dozen rounds in a conventional shotgun is probably
sufficient to convince more realistic threats to find an easier
target, at the very least.
.410 Revolvers.
These are on the bubble of practicality. The
Taurus Judge
was initially promoted as an automobile defense gun. And the
concept has some merit. A load of birdshot to the face would
no-doubt be substantially more effective against a carjacker,
over-the-line 'protester', or road-raging nut than pepper spray.
All with substantially less risk of serious collateral damage than
flinging bullets around. Plus, the Judge (and the
S&W
Governor it inspired) can have the first chamber(s) loaded
with
.410 shotshells, and the remainder loaded with
.45
Colt or
.45 ACP, just in case the threat at hand is a
psycho, crackhead, or Moro Tribesman who won't back-off after being
hit with pellets.
What keeps these revolvers from qualifying as practical is the
fact that you can get revolvers to do essentially the same thing at
half the weight and price. Shotshells can be purchased (or
hand-loaded) for revolvers in several popular calibers. These
rounds may not have the payload of
.410 shells, but we're
not shooting quail at 30 yards with them. At the short ranges at
which you'd use a birdshot revolver, the snake-shot should be an
effective deterrent against ordinary thugs.
Pulling .410 Revolvers even deeper into the novelty category are
the many
.410 gimmick shotshells that have been introduced
for them. Slug and buck, disks and BBs, etc. Kind of misses the
original point. If you're going to fire projectiles more
substantial than birdshot, why not just use good old BULLETS?
Super-Magnum Handguns.
In the 1971 film
Dirty Harry, Clint Eastwood
pointed a
.44 Magnum revolver at Albert Popwell and told him
that it was the most powerful handgun in the world, and capable of
blowing his head clean off. While not entirely correct, this moment
of Hollywood badassery started an unending quest among gun nuts to
own the most wrist-breakingly, eardrum-burstingly overpowered gun
they could get their hands on.
The
.44 Magnum is on the uppermost tier of powerful
practical sidearm cartridges. Much more, and you'll need a revolver
so large and heavy to make full use of it that you'd may as well
carry a long gun. Even
.44 Magnum class cartridges are
mostly wasted on muzzle flash in popular compact revolvers, and
provide only a modest firepower advantage over sub-magnum rounds
like the
.44 Special.
Still, practicality doesn't figure into this sort of thing. So
we've got a whole slew of cartridges that make the
.44 Magnum
look like a mouse-gun. But they're far better suited to something
like an updated
Winchester 1886 rifle than any handgun.
.50 BMG 'Sniper' Rifles.
In the wake of
World War I, John Moses Browning decided
to radically scale-up the standard US infantry rifle cartridge for
use in his new heavy machine gun, creating the
.50 Browning
Machine Gun round. It wasn't long before someone realized
lighter rifles could be built around this powerhouse cartridge.
These have gained considerable popularity since the 1980s.
A
.50 BMG is the most powerful rifle you can legally own
without registering it under the NFA as a
"destructive device".
It has an effective range of well over a mile, and can punch through
medium armor and considerable hard cover.
They also cost ten to twenty times as much as a practical
precision shooting rifles, weigh four times as much, and use ammo
that costs five times as much, and require special equipment if you
want to roll your own.
In skilled hands, an 'ordinary' bolt-action with decent glass in
common calibers like
30-06 and
.308 can reliably
take out targets at over a quarter of a mile. There are few
realistic scenarios in doomstead defense that would require more
than that from a 'sniper' rifle.
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