6/25/13

Huzzah!  We are as far from Christmas as possible!  I hate Christmas.  People all acting like they give a shit about one another.  Fuck you now, fuck you then.  People suck.  But I digress. [ Should that be "Huzzah!" or "Humbug!"? - SM ]  I was going to tell y'all about the gun show on Sunday.  I met Larry at the credit onion, as usual, and we roll to the convention center in his truck.  He paid and we parked in our usual spot in the garage.  He’d brought his other Saiga 12 to have the Russian tune up since we were both so pleased with how the other two guns turned out.  We made a bee-line to the Russian’s booth.  Oh, when we were there Saturday picking up our guns, I saw that he had a Kel Tec Sub 2000 9mm folding carbine for sale.  I've been “looking for” one of those for some time.  I fondled it while Larry transacted about the Saiga.  It was about $200.00 more than I had on me so I put it down again for the time being.  Eventually we began walking the aisles.  We didn’t really see anything which caught our fancy in the first three or four rows though.  Then I saw a Meprolight optic in a display.  I'm not sure why I stopped to look at it but it caught my eye for some reason.  The dude selling it began talking about how the US won't let Trijicon export optics that they sell to the military but that this was an Israeli built copy.  His theory is Trijicon set up a factory in Israel to sell them to the Israeli military and now is importing that version to the states.  It is a really nice sight with a fiber optic daytime reticle and tritium illumination for nighttime shoosting.  They usually sell in the $600.00 range so his price of $525.00 seemed pretty good.  I thought it over for a bit and when he sensed he might be losing a sale, he said he’d take $500.00 for it.  I asked Larry for an additional $100.00 and bought it.  It was an impulse buy which I regretted the rest of the show… but last night reversed that opinion.  I'll get to the reason why in a bit.  We continued walking.  Larry found something to buy and we then took stuff down to the truck.  I grokked a few things which I could have bought had I not bought the optic, but only regretted it a little because I knew I could still use plastic if need be.  Nothing was THAT un-live-without-able.  Eventually we got near the end of the big room around 1230 h and broke for lunch.  But before that, on one of the last few rows, I saw a gun I'd seen at a previous show which caught my eye again.  It was a single shot, break-open carbine rifle in .45-70 Government caliber.  As I was grokking it, the guy said, “That’s a neat little Rabbit gun.”  As I was shorting in derision, he went on to say, “Not the furry little woodland critter, the car from Germany!”  He’s right too.  A .45-70 round hitting a bunny wouldn’t leave too much behind.  For comparison, a round that many of you might be familiar with, .45 ACP, has an overall length of 1.275”.  The .45 Colt, as used in the Taurus Judge, has an overall length of 1.6”.  But the .45-70 is 2.55” in length!  The thing is, for all intensive porpoises, a rifle round spitting out nearly half an inch of lead!  I want this gun so bad!  I'm not sure why, but I want it!  I looked at the $325.00 price tag and was thinking about it when the guy said he could go $300.00 for it.  When I didn’t jump on it, he looked in his book and thought for a moment before saying, “Ok, I can't do credit, but I can go $290.00 cash.”  I was hooked.  I said I'd have to go to the ATM after we finished the last two rows.  So, I have no idea what they were selling on those last two rows.  We broke for lunch and I kept thinking about that gun.  I have no room for it in my gun safe, I don’t need to get into another caliber (even one as friggin’ cool as .45-70), and I'd have to get at least $400.00 ($300.00 for the gun and $100.00 to pay back Larry) out of the ATM to make it happen.  Everything said, “Don’t do it!”  Even Larry was against the idea.  He tried valiantly to talk me out of it too.  We ate our chicken strips and jalapeno poppers while I ciphered and figgered on it.  Eventually we finished lunch and headed in to the small room across the hall for the last bit of the show.  I didn’t see anything in there which dissuaded me from my delusional desire to buy that .45-70 gun.  We finished with the show and did our usual walk back to stuff which caught our eyes.  As we entered the big room, I stopped at the ATM to get the money I'd need for the gun.  Fortunately, it stopped me at $200.00, saving me from doing something really dumb.  I gave $100.00 to Larry and considered it fate stepping in to prevent me from being a total fuck-tard again.  We looked in vain for the CZ pistol he thought he saw, but never found it.  As they were making the twenty, fifteen, ten, and five minutes to gun show closing announcements, Larry stood and thought about a different CZ pistol at the table of the guy from whom I bought those two 1911s back a few years ago.  He’s a doctor in Benbrook who sold Larry a Saiga rifle as well.  When it was becoming obvious that Larry was trapped in a conundrum, I took off to go look at the Russian’s Kel Tec 9mm carbine again.  I grokked it until the “The gun show is now closed” announcement and decided I didn’t need to put it on the credit card after all.  I told him I'd probably buy it at the next show if he still had it and headed back to round up Larry.  He was still waffling over the CZ.  I finally said, “You don’t need that.” and drug him away.  We went back to the credit onion and I headed home.  I tried the optic I'd bought on the Saiga 12 and decided that I liked it… a lot.  I put the 0.75” riser on the gun and tried the optic at a higher mounting point.  I liked it even more because I could use it with the ear muff hearing protection and it gave me some rail space for the laser I was waiting to come in the mail.  Well, the laser arrived yesterday.  When I got home from work, I opened it up and installed it on the riser.  I tried it out.  It is kind of cool how it shines eight big red dots in a circle around a central aiming point and a bunch of little tiny “artifact” spots from the refraction process.  It really does present a shotgun pattern.  I put the optic on behind it and tried them simultaneously.  Yeah, they didn’t line up for shit.  I tried to adjust the laser but it wouldn’t move in the direction I needed it to.  So, there’s another big chunk of cash down the toilet.  This is the second time I've been burned by a cheap laser.  I won't be buying another.  I tossed it in the bottom drawer of the dresser with all the other gun shit I've collected over the years and reexamined the optic and mount.  I decided that without the laser, I didn’t need the riser’s extra rail space and that I could always use ear plugs when shooting.  I removed the riser and test fitted the optic again straight on the gun.  Yeah, I like that a lot better.  So, I guess I'll be taking the Saiga and optic to the range to sight it in this Saturday after John and I do whatever it is we’re going to do.  And on that note, I'm done talking to y'all for today.  I'll tell y'all some Mini news tomorrow.