jkh@ucbjade.BERKELEY.EDU (Jordan K. Hubbard) (10/24/85)
Comments in response to a couple recent postings: One arms museum I liked was the John M. Browning museum at Rock Island Arsenal (located on an island in the Mississippi between Rock Island, IL and Davenport, Iowa). I worked at RIA for a year, back when the command there was called "Weapons Command" (a much more impressive name than the current acronym, which I can't even find in my DoD phone book at the moment...). The Arsenal has a lot of historic buildings, and is open to the public. One of these buildings houses this museum, which had a lot of neat weaponry back in '67-'68, when I was there. I used to spend a lot of lunch periods drooling over all the toys... (There are a lot of other arms-oriented museums [musea?] at Army installations all over the country. Most posts have a PR office that can send you brochures or at least describe what public-access displays they have.) And for home defense, and the .45 vs 9mm controversy: For those whose regional situation makes getting a pistol difficult [legally], there are a lot of pistol-caliber semiauto carbines available and which can be purchased as "rifles", in legal terms, with much less paperwork than a pistol requires, usually only requiring the BATF form at time of purchase. These are midway in size between a handgun and a rifle, usually with folding stocks to keep them short. Of course, you can buy folding stocks or pistol grips for many rifles or shotguns that also shorten them, but these carbines fire pistol-caliber ammo, which doesn't have the penetration problems that rifle-caliber ammo will create. Unfortunately, most of the interesting models of this genre were made in 9mm only, and we have already seen comments about how 9mm penetrates excessively (for home defense use) when fired in a pistol; the problem is exacerbated when you fire it from a 16-inch barrel. The solution, then, is to get a .45 caliber carbine. The commonest one of these was the semi-auto Thompson, or the Commando Arms sort-of-lookalike model. These are rather heavy, which probably doesn't mean much if you aren't going to carry it around, and does add a lot of stability (I once had the opportunity to fire a for-real Thompson full-auto; the weight and slow cyclic rate made it easy to hold on target for long bursts). These don't have folding stocks, though, and lose the desired compactness. The latest Guns and Ammo magazine, though, has an article on a gun that might be the ideal solution -- a .45 caliber Uzi. (For those with 9mm Uzis, a retrofit conversion kit is also available.) I would give it some while for the new model to get any functioning bugs worked out, but then this might be the ideal compromise in terms of legal availability, size, safety, and effectiveness. (I still lean toward a shotgun as a better choice, and most are certainly cheaper, but if you want something else, check this Uzi out. There is also something to be said for the intimidating appearance of these paramilitary models [but then people also speak of the intimidating appearance of the large bore of a shotgun pointed at you...].) I never bought an Uzi carbine, because I am prejudiced against lugging a gun about as big and heavy as a rifle for only 9mm semi-auto output (the real full-auto models are a different matter, and I have no dispute with their battle-proven effectiveness). I am leaning toward getting one in .45, though, just for grins... Will Martin ARPA/MILNET: wmartin@almsa-1.ARPA USENET: seismo!brl-bmd!wmartin (there may be nonsense in the header lines; use addresses here)