Silly Guns

This is somewhere between a Monday Gunday and a Wednesday Night Wackiness post. Logically, I should have posted this on Tuesday, but yesterday I was squee-ing my fool head off because of all the hits I was getting on my Unknown Ponies post.

Pretty much like this:



Nota bene:  I am fully aware that many of you are annoyed by my constant posting of pony pictures, memes and videos. What you need to realize is that I feel that exact same annoyance every time you go on about sports, wrestling, NASCAR, or "arrow to the knee" jokes that stopped being funny eight seconds after Skyrim came out. So deal with it.


Okay, so: guns. As some of you may know, the 2012 SHOT Show was last weekend in Las Vegas, and for those of you who don't, suffice it to say that it's a trade show for gun manufacturers. Anyway, one of the biggest splashes made this year were two rifle offerings by Mossberg, one in .30-30 and one in .22LR:

Now those of you who have known me for a while know my tastes.I am a geardo, a compulsive accessorizer, and have an appreciation for the aesthetically funky. But these... oh, but these...

I am torn. One the one hand, these are AWFUL, because no one needs a tactical lever-action anything. On the other hand, they are so resplendently awful they actually back into awesome by way of absurdity, and they do look a lot like the kinds of rifles you'd see on Firefly. So I can appreciate them as silly, over-the-top jokes, and most of the time no one really gets my humor anyway so I'm okay with that.

But still, two things keep nagging at me. For one, that .22LR is slowly growing on me like a fungus. "Hmm, six-position stock," I say, "perfect for those of us with short arms. Those rails are great for mounting bipods or lasers for precision shooting. And by having plastic furniture instead of wood, it's both lighter and weatherproof. And lever-action means my left-handed mother can shoot it without difficulty. And I am quite fond of a tube-feed."

Really, the only thing stopping me is the black color (and the price, of course). Not that I have anything against black; I am quite pro-black, what with my goth tendencies. But tactical black simply does not suit a .22 of any kind. If, however, it were to be Duracoated in a nice camouflage scheme...

The other thing which nags at me is that this is possibly a case of fridge brilliance on the part of Mossberg. Both of these rifles have fixed ammo capacity and cannot, it any way, be made semi-auto. They are the perfect definition of "California Compliant", up to not having a pistol grip. Yet they look tactical, therefore "scary." I wouldn't be surprised if these models were made expressly to screw with California legislators, who will no doubt want to ban them because they're "evil black rifles"... and yet they're 100% compliant, which means that California is basically scared of the color black.

Which would be racist.








The more I think about these rifles, the more I like them, despite them being hideous. And that's just wacky.