Ok, there’s a page up for the magazines. I took delivery on a bunch of them today and a few of you decided to go long and took about 40% of them right off the bat. Makes me wonder if you know something I don’t. Have about 100 of each left, so theyre there if you want ’em. Got ’em sitting in pile here so they go out the door as soon as you pay the invoice. Whatever isn’t sold by Halloween goes into my personal stash.

Oh, and they make great stocking stuffers for Paratus, Festivus, or Chrismahanukwanzaka.

I might be able to put together another deal on 10/22 mags if anyone is interested. I was going to pick up a few more for my own needs…”just in case”, but figured I’d see if there was any interest. It would be very similar to the last few….they’d be Butler Creek Hot Lips and Steel Lips  25-rd mags, bulk packed (meaning they are loose and not in any type of packaging), and they’d be sold in quantities of 10, 15, or 20 with a small price discount the more you buy. If I can get enough people on board to make it worth ordering, say, a hundred…..then it would work. If interested, email me with “magazines” in the subject line so my spam filters don’t kick it to the curb.

Hmm..first it was an StG44 ad now this.

A couple remodeling an old home in north-central France found a cache of ammo, grenades and submachine guns hidden under a granite floor, The Lyonne Republicaine reported.

The find was made in July by the couple in the Quarré-les-Tombes area, about 150 miles away from Paris. Cached under the floor were three STEN guns, over a dozen Britsh Mills bomb type fragmentation grenades, three handguns, more than 1,000 rounds of ammo, and several Bren light machine gun magazines.

I wonder if, a hundred years from now, people in Idaho, Arizona, and Montana will be finding PVC burial tubes full of guns and ammo every time someone digs up an old driveway or tears down an old garage.

Mathematically, there has got to be a lot more of these sorts of things out there. WW2 left millions of guns and related materials spread across Europe. It’s no stretch to think that there were quite a few people who squirreled a bunch of it away.

Here in Montana, the thing found mostly is what we term ‘relics’. Someone plows up an old Sharps that is nothing but a barely recognizable collection of rust, or someone finds an old Colt in the rocks under a bridge somewhere. We all read about that Winchester that got found propped up against a tree after a hundred years, right? I’ve met more than a few folks who have found guns out in the sticks…usually a gun someone lost or forgot, rather than a purposefully left cache. But…..there are those out there too. Once in a a very rare while, one turns up when someone leaves it where they shouldn’t have.

I’m always fascinated by these types of stories because they usually have interesting stories of their own behind them.

Amazingly, there was snow on the ground this morning. I can not recall getting any real accumulation of snow this early for quite a while. Methinks this might suggest a colder/snowier winter than usual.

One of the things I need to do, since Ma Nature was nice enough to give me a gentle reminder, is to make sure the kerosene heaters are set up and ready for the winter. Given the rate at which natural disasters seem to be occurring these days, it might not be out of place to have a Plan B heating source on standby.

I should probably also move the winter gear out to the vehicle. Actually, come to think of it, I should probably go through it and make sure all the gear is still in good/ready condition and swap out the batteries for new ones. Hmm.

And, of course, hunting season opens in a few weeks. I think I’m going to sit this one out. I just don’t have the time to spend a day tromping around the woods looking for Bambi. The opportunity cost is just to high to spend the resources hunting. Oh, sure…apocalypse gets here I’ll have much more motivation to knock down some animals, but right now it makes more sense for me to simply purchase an equivalent amount of meat and get on with the other things that need doing.

And, before the snow starts, I need to get to the range and function test the new handguns before I put ’em away for the Deep Sleep.

Nuts…Im going to have to start making a list.

Ruger has always been desperate for the much-vaunted military/police contract ever since they threw their hat in the ring with the P85 thirty years ago. Unfortunately, Ruger has just never been able to crack that particular nut. Other than a small (5000~) contract to the US military, they have been, by and large, virtually unheard of in the LE and military handgun market.

Which makes me wonder…who the heck were these for?
These are the first ‘restricted’*** P-series mags I’ve ever seen. I mean, they were obviously made during the Clinton Assault Weapon Ban era, but when they were made they could only be sold to cops and troops. And, as I said, Ruger had virtually no representation in either group. I guess they made ’em “just in case” some department on a (very) tight budget adopted a P-series gun.

Anyway, found a lot of them on Gunbroker and they showed up today. Soup to nuts, I think it was about $15 ea. which is a good price for a factory magazine.

But, it’s kinda cool…I’venever seen a restricted P-series mag before.

*** = See, kids….back in the Bad Ol’ Days, new magazines were limited to a 10-rd capacity unless you were one of the Only Ones. Existing mags shot up in price since they were grandfathered in. And all the new magazines that held more than 10-rds had to be marked in this manner so the nice federal agent would know you had broken the law by being a peon-in-possession. Did anyone ever get federal jail time over it? Beats me. The one time a federal agent asked me about the restricted Glock magazine in my gun case I told him I was shooting at a range with a buncha cops and we musta mixed up magazines. Suited him.

The Kalispell gun show I went to yesterday was an utter waste of time and gasoline. If there were more than fifty tables, I’d be surprised. Gun shows in this state just are not what they used to be. I think part of the problem is that there are so many more of them than there used to be that it has watered down the quality of them.

To try and get something out of the trip, I swung through various gun and pawn shops on my way back. Did stop in at a little pawn shop in Kalispell that, while unremarkable, had a really nice guy behind the counter who was quite pleasant to talk to about guns. He had a Mini-14 with the old-style factory folding stock up on the shelf. That was tempting. Also had the first used KelTec RFB i’ve ever seen. And, sitting on the counter, was a ‘misc box’ full of assorted magazines. Hmmm.

Wound up finding five factory Ruger mags for the P95s. Ten bucks each, offered him eight, he said “Nah, make it seven.” So I got five mags for thirty five bucks. A mix of regular capacity and ten rounders. Coincidentally, I picked up a dozen used mags off GunBroker last week so unless some sort of insane deal comes down the pike, I’m pretty much done buying Ruger 9mm mags.

After leaving Kalispell, I stopped in Ronan at a gun shop where I’ve know the guy behind the counter for twenty years. They deal in mostly new guns, but he had a pair of Winchester Model 100’s in .308 to show me. Kinda cute, but not my thing. I did get to handle Rugers new .44 Special GP100 and the new 8-shot .357 on the Redhawk frame. That .357 would be a stunning beast if they’d drop a 5″ or 6″ barrel on it instead of that snubby barrel.

So the trip wasn’t a total waste since I got some mags out of it, but I think I’m definitely going to rethink these gun shows that require traveling quite some distance to attend. For example, I’d like to go to the Billings gun show but for a five hour drive each way there had better be an abundance of tables and opportunity.

But..extra mags, so, yay.