I'm here to celebrate the 4th of July as most people will not bother to read anything as they will be off doing whatever people do on this day in America.
What I'm celebrating in the base of the entire 4th of July is the American firearm in all it's glorious forms from cheap guns to expensive guns.
This is the story of an inexpensive gun, before the cartels leveraged the regimes of the past few years to price ammunition and firearms out of people's reach if one is the majority millions of poor.
See America was once a nation of cheap food policy and a secretive cheap gun policy to always keep Americans in piles of ammunition and guns.
The gun which I write of is a 3 in 1. Most people would have no idea what this firearm is, but it was a series of inexpensive firearms put out by Savage Arms. For those who are unfamiliar with Savage, Savage created thee magnificent 99 chambered with smokeless powder rounds of 30 30 Winchester, 22 Hi Power, and his legendary 250 and 300 Savage.
Savage was the Lincoln of the firearms line and Stevens was the Ford.....an inexpensive gun for immigrants, black folks in Mississippi and westerners who didn't have a pot to piss in.
I write of the Stevens 3 in 1 as that is the gun which an immensely ugly gun. It was manufactured with a white stock of some kind of hardwood which cracked, and this awful black end cap painted on it, so it mimicked and ebony forearm.
I have no idea what kind of butt plate it had on the one I had, but it was probably plastic as mine is gone.........and I replaced it with a horse harness line pad I created and screwed on to make it look more presentable.
This saga starts with my need as a young child of a gun to shoot gophers with. Having no experience and only observational degrees to know about guns, I sorted through my dad's arsenal of cast offs he had picked up.
Being a humble child I set upon one, a dusty one, hanging on the wall, which was so beat up and ugly. I presumed that since it was so crappy looking no one would mind my confiscating it, so I picked it up...........minus the riser on the back site as my brother had lost that tinkering with it......and off I went shooting gophers.
I had a Ford Bronco, a radio and a brick of 22 rounds and by the end of my adventure I had fed those 500 rounds to the 3 in 1, and found it a delightfully accurate weapon.
When I pulled the trigger, things just died with it.
Sure it was heavy as an M1, but I have made more sure shots and more scratch shots with that rifle than anything I have ever pulled a trigger on. I did try a more expensive Savage, but it just did not "feel" the same, so back to this old relic I went.
That is not to say that this Stevens is perfect. It has an immense affection for eating Winchester Super x hollow points. I know this from the thousands of rounds I have put through her. The problem is it tries to kill me sort of when I put those super CCI rounds through her.
Once I heard this immense bang as I was shooting at something..........I forget the critter as the bang was so disturbing. What happened was this semi auto kicked out the magnum round so hard and fast that it literally fired the next round before it was chambered.
Desiring to keep my eyes, my hearing and my life, I made a decree that no more high velocity rounds would be fed to the Stevens.
I had problems with Remington Hornet's too in they would jam in the magazine which really sucked as wedged in there, one had to basically pry the bullet out of the casing and as that is probably something which might cause an explosion, I just try to feed her the Super X fodder.
The 3 in 1 comes from this gun is I guess 3 rifles in 1, as you can shoot is semi auto, single shot and I suppose singly firing one round at a time from the magazine.
Over the years I have decided to love this gun in putting an oak stain varnish on her, that butt pad, and I built a riser for the site ramp out of a piece of metal mud flap people had on their doorsteps to scrape off more than mud.
It is outright treachery that hollow points are now a thing the cartels are not offering, as there is an entire genre now of disarming Americans, putting them into the wrong ammo and just out pricing everything.
So yes I have lovely 22 rifles which make snobs smile, but I also have a junk lot of guns I tend to reach for first, because like that fabled Winchester 73 in a rifle or shotgun made perfect, more perfect than thousands of dollars firearms, and they came out of mass production USA.
Amazing thing is like Col. Townsend Whelen related in I believe Stevens gave him some mass produced cheap gun in a 22 and told him, "Do not think that I'm sending you anything of value, but I believe you will find that in time this gun will still be shooting long after the expensive ones are not".
Whelen replied years later, "I'll be darned if they were not right!"
America should have a cheap gun policy. Those fawning pricks though like Sen. John Thune of Republican South Dakota will not though lead an advocacy of welfare guns for Americans, in if you can not afford a gun, the Government should supply you with one or several, exactly as they did in Colonial times.
I doubt if Jim DeMint and any "conservative" would advocate such, but the least they could do for national security is return America to it's historic cheap, but wonderfully made ammunition and firearms policy...........because with it, the 4th of July came to being, and with it, all of the best generations of Soldiers were products of roaming wood and field with a firearm, as Teddy Roosevelt said, "It was the best Soldier training around".
That though is my celebration of this wonderful 4th of July. Cheap and bountiful supplies of American mass manufactured firearms.
It is not odd that this is now a collectors item, but in reality, it is still the most worthless rifle I own, but in it, it is the most accurate weapon I own.......and the one always loaded to deal with the critters that keep trying to destroy life here.
Oh for women wearing fur coats like Russian gals............you have no idea what that would do to the American economy if women just wore fur.
agtG
