Range time

Yesterday I hit the range with new (but good) shooter Proud Hillbilly.

As can be seen on her blog report, she brought out two nice but very old guns--an H&R 929 .22 revolver and a Nazi-proofed Browning Model 1922. A cursory check showed them to be complete (except for a missing hinge screw on the H&R that had been half-ass replaced with a brass wood screw long ago) and safe to fire so she gave them a good work-out. I also brought out a 1911, a Ruger 10-22 rifle, and a Smith and Wesson Model 10 that hasn't been out of the gun safe in years. This one was a nickel-plated 5" revolver bearing a Detroit Police Dept. stamp on the backstrap.Back in the early 1990's, when that department went to Glocks, had a number of these to dispose of. Now many departments would have let their officers buy their own guns back, but not Detroit. Then City Council President Maryann Mahaffey--never a bright bulb--held a press conference to announce that to "keep these guns from ever winding up back on the streets", the city was going to sell them to a law enforcement wholesaler. They sold thousands of these to a wholesaler for $15.00 each, and the wholesaler turned around and sold them to any dealer who wanted to buy them, with the result that gun stores and gun shows and even small kitchen-table dealers like I was at the time were awash with these pistols.

At the same time, the city destroyed 10 vintage Thompson submachine guns by crushing them with a steamroller in front of the news cameras to show how serious they were about keeping "dangerous weapons" off the streets, and this at a time when the city was laying employees off. They might as well have crushed ten new police cars because that's what those guns were worth. But hey--it's only the public's money, right? So why sell or trade those to a federally-licensed dealer or collector?

Anyway...I helped Proud Hillbilly get a bit more comfortable with her stance and aiming and she had a good time, and I worked on some more drills for the next AFHF course, managing to have a good time myself. That old Smith still shoots as good as it did back when it was helping preserve law and order in Detroit.

And then we went and had lunch and drank some good Oatmeal Stout. And life was pronounced to be good.