[h/t to Bitter]
In Pima County, AZ, where Representative Gabrielle Giffords was famously shot and seriously injured in January, the local Republican party is holding a fundraising raffle. As is common away from the coast, they're raffling off a gun. Naturally, several "progressives" are upset that people still use guns as usual after a traumatic event was supposed to have made everybody see them as Evil Totems. Not news.
But this... This goes beyond the usual stupid:
For just $10, readers can purchase a raffle ticket (out of 125 offered) for a chance to win a brand new handgun. Not just any handgun, but a Glock 23
Arizona Republicans surely know just how effective this particular brand of gun can be. After all, it was only eight months ago that Jared Lee Loughner used a Glock 19 in Tucson - the seat of Pima County - to shoot Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in the head.[...]
Let's see... with 125 tickets, at $10 a ticket, the PCRP could pull in a cool $1,250 - minus whatever their souls are worth, of course.
The Glock pistol, in its dozens of variants, is probably the most popular pistol in the United States. More so than any other pistol, the Glock is "just any handgun". There are two and a half million of them out there. They're used by thousands of police and military forces worldwide, from the NYPD to the armed units of London's Metropolitan Police. For Nyarlathotep's sake, the Pima County Sheriff's department issues its officers Glocks. The Glock has proved such a perfect generic baseline handgun that almost every major firearms manufacturer now makes guns mimicking it. I grasp that the writer most likely has a preexisting tribal taboo against handguns in general, but believing that the actions of an insane murderer should make a ubiquitous manufacturer's entire product line haraam to people outside his tribe is pretty foolish.
This is like, to paraphrase one commenter, a radical anti-auto environmentalist insisting it's in poor taste for a Republican to drive a Ford F150 after a Democrat was run over with a Ford Focus.
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I'm pretty sure I have a pocket knife with more parts than my Glock. For sure the pocketknife is harder to disassemble for cleaning. Other than the loaded chamber indicator, the Glock is practically the Platonic Ideal of a firearm mechanically speaking. Aesthetically it's a black plastic brick with the soul full of efficient Austrian sex (which is like efficient German sex with an inferiority complex).
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely. The Glock is so popular because it's the double-action revolver of the pistol world.
ReplyDeleteI am minded of a post at VFTP in which Tam noted that revolvers were only operationally simplistic; and that the lock-work behind the "pull the trigger and goes bang" was ridiculously complex. If you value your sanity, don't look under the grip of a revolver.
ReplyDeleteI've opened up our 1950s vintage S&W Model 10--a generic DA revolver if ever there was one.
ReplyDeleteUnder the grip is just fine; there's nothing in there but a leaf spring and its tension screw.
Take off the sideplate, though, and it's a congeries of tormented shapes, the contemplation of whose interlocking geometry costs SAN. I didn't deliberately remove any parts, and still had a bit of trouble getting the drop safety back in place to close the gun up.
People who talk about how DA revolvers are more reliable because they're "simpler" have obviously never opened one.
Heh. I have held a revolver twice in my life - I confused sideplate with grip.
ReplyDeleteI figured. But this way, I got to say "congeries of tormented shapes". ;)
ReplyDeleteSo, Cthuhlu pays extra for double-action?
ReplyDelete