It took over 30 years (I'm serious), but I finally got my hands on a Thompson M1 SMG. I've been wanting a tommy gun since the days of Combat and 12 inch GI Joes. My brother Trey used to horde the tommy gun and dump the M1s on me and Shawn. He knew I'd trade him stuff so that I could get the M1. He always had the tommy gun somehow.

I finally got one for real two weeks ago (actually, my brother got one that I can use when I'm in Arizona; more on that later). One happier camper you cannot find (even though my gun isn't like the old ones, it's still made by John Thompson's company, and is as real as you can get for under $15,000).

It's weird... When people (like, at work) ask you what it is you're looking so happy about when they find you staring off into the distance, they don't think of World War II and the unmitigated cajones of the people who served our country when you say that you've finally realized your dream of owning a piece of history by buying a Thompson SMG. They think -- and you can see this in their eyes -- that you've got some sort of Chicago typewriter obsession, drum magazine and all. And that you keep it in a guitar case, probably next to your zoot suit. Who gives a squirt about some criminals!? This thing literally helped free the Western World.

Yeah, so it was used by some crooks here and there for a couple years. It was also used extensively by the IRA in the 1930s, and nobody remembers that. It was used a lot in WWII. So when I'm found staring wistfully into space, I'm actually thinking of being out in the open holding a piece of history, not stuck in some drafty castle of an office building typing away on some nearly relevant project du jour, trying not to sneeze from the mold infestation.

Not to belabor the point, but I've wanted to know how a Thompson sounds, how it feels, what it looks like, where all the parts are, what it looks like inside, what it smells like... and so on. I've been wanting to know that since I was around 6 years old. And now I finally do. I'm like that balding guy who finally gets a Corvette in his mid life. Except I'm slightly younger than midlife, have all my hair, and have a tangible piece of modern history instead of the desire to impress teenage girls with ersatz virility. I get to wonder about guys on D-Day when I'm out in the woods with friends, they get to curb-sneak Filipinos in Mitsubishis when they're at the mall. To each his own.

My first impression? It's really fucking heavy. I put that swearing in there on purpose. The guy it was purchased from remarked at my grunting when first picking it up and said "Yeah... it's like a sack of phone books... that's one fine chopper...". He was right. It weighs like 13 1/2 pounds. Unloaded. Each loaded 30 round stick magaine weighs like another half pound, or there abouts. Heavy. It's a .45 ACP round after all. I'm no bodybuilder, but I'm no small guy either, and it would have sucked to carry that thing and it's ammo all over Europe. I now have even more respect for the men that did. Even after I wrote that I stopped to wonder...

My second impression is regarding the number of sharp edges on it. There are a lot of them. I still have the healing scars of some 6 cuts just from taking it apart. Every corner is very sharp. Andy says I need to get it "beburred", and I might. If I was to carry it into battle (especially if I was to come out of a plane), I'd almost certainly have taken a file to at least the areas around the magazine well/trigger guard areas. Everywhere around the grip needs a little rounding or you need a few Band-Aids.

The wood, by the way, is amazing. It's not like a "war gun". It's nearly German in it's craftsmanship and attention to detail. But the gun is also very hard to use. The bolt handle (the thing that allows you to pull the bolt back and put a bullet in the chamber) is really hard to get a hold of. You can kinda see it here. See the bolt handle? No? That's because it's very tiny. Maybe my hands are too big for the gun, I don't know. But Trey and I came up with a solution in using a 6" wood dowel that you can stick into the hollow end of the bolt handle to charge the weapon. Combined with some very very strong springs (the Thompson works on a straight blowback principle, so the springs do all the work in reloading it), it's a hard rifle to use the first time. I'm going to order a replacement bolt handle and then extend it about 1/2 inch using some hardwood and a piece of aluminum tubing (I don't want to weigh the bolt down too much becuase I don't know what weird wear that might cause on the insides of the gun).

The recoil is minimal at best. The gun's very heavy and it shoots a pistol cartridge, so you can do the math there. The stock takes some getting used to, but I like it. Loading a magazine was odd the first few times but then became very strangely natural shortly thereafter (you basically hold the magazine in your left hand, using your left thumb to push the mag release up while inserting the new mag; your right hand stays on the pistol grip, holding the gun). I have 4 magazines for it, but I have five more on order. I need to get at least 40 magazines, however, and maybe some spare springs, followers and floor plates. That's not excessive, 40 mags. I plan on owning the gun for at least 50 more years, and mags get a lot of use. Furthermore, the gun is useless without them. You need to have some you never use (hopefully ones which have never been used) just for posterity's sake.

Hmmm. I've forgotten where I'm going with this, as I've written it in bits, over the course of a week. I haven't had much time to waste with personal nonsense since I got back from my trip.

Oh, the sound. Yeah, it is like a typewriter. Take a look at this video of my Uncle John shooting it. It has this mechanical sound to it -- kind of a clacking noise. It's hard noise to describe, but sounds pretty accurate on the video (minus the sharp 'crack' of the gases which push the bullet out of the barrel breaking the sound barrier). I can totally see where they'd call it a "Chicago Typewriter" when shooting it in full-auto mode. Which is something sort of funny about seeing someone shoot a Thompson: that need to shoot fast. The first time anyone shot it, they eventually just started pulling the trigger as fast as they could. Here's me getting in on the act. You can kind of hear that typewriter noise in that video as well. (You can also see the dowel trick Trey and I came up with.)

While pulling the trigger really quickly is an irresitible, but it's actualy a very accurate rifle (carbine, whatever). The first few magazines I put through it were aimed, though, much like with Uncle John in that vid above. UJ did pretty darn well with it, too, but then UJ is something of a marksman in the first place (as he's said before "a rifle is only as accurate as the person using it"). That water jug was pretty far away in any case.

I took some items from work to do some "ballistics" tests. One of my co-workers, Dave, gave me this slab of resin to shoot. It's the same stuff they use for chemisty lab table tops. Thick, heavy black stuff. I was talking to him a few weeks back about shooting bowling balls, and he remebered that he had this sample chunk of resin left over from somewhere. He wanted to know what would happen if you shot it, so I did. It pretty much shattered into lots and lots of pieces. I recovered two of the larger bits, and they fit back together like puzzle pieces. I decided to bring them both back to him so he could see the aftermath. They even have some spalling from an impact. Dave's got the chunks in his office and seems farily proud of them.

Dave also gave me a non-working IBM hard drive to "test". It's one of those faulty Deskstar models every calls "Deathstars". We've had a lot of them go bad and they've generally caused more than their fair share of headaches. So I shot one with a Tommy gun.

Here's the front view. I was aiming for the center of the upper circular part. I was a little low, but that was only like my second time shooting it. As it happened, I hit it in just the right place, through the drive controller. The bullet went right through the electronic "brain" of the drive, just missing the drive platters (the phonograph-like disks where all the actual data is kept). So you can see lot of stuff insdie the drive if you look closely.

I've been staring in there off and on looking at all the bits (it's like a cutaway of a hard drive) for a while now, so I decided to try out my new camera's macro lens to see if I could get some intimate photos. You can see the guts pretty well in this picture. (You can see the edge of the drive platters at about the one o'clock position in that hole.) It's a pretty big hole. In fact, all that peering into it gave me an idea. The hole's about eyeball sized. So I grabbed a mirror and took a self-portrait of me looking through the hole. Because I couldn't quite see the camera's LCD display in the hand mirror, I took two eyeball pictures. They turned out to be eerily similar, and were just begging for an animation. Big Brother is watching you.

Sadly, the new gun lives permanently in Arizona. I can't own it in California because it has a pistol grip. What complete and utter nonsense our fine Democratic senators Boxer and Feinstein have wrought. Actually, I don't even own it; I just borrow it when I go shooting with my brother. But it's mine in spirit and maybe some day I'll get to live in a state that won't mind me owning some history. At least my dad can get some use out of it.

That was certainly a lot about one thing. Yeah.

Also on that trip, Andy brought his new toy: a former Israeli military Browning 1919A4 machine gun. Never having seen/felt/fired a crew-served weapon before, it was quite a hoot. We shot it a lot. In fact, everyone but UJ got a chance. Here's a vid of me having a go. It's really pretty darn accurate, even when doing the twitchy finger thing required of all full-auto weapons hobbled in semi mode. We were pretty well saturating a small clearing on a hillside a 1/2 mile away and getting consistent groups. I think it's because the whole thing weighs so much. It would bounce up when fired, but come back down pretty much where it was. I told Andy that he needs to get some sandbags and pile them up on the legs of the tripod. Next camping trip will see "an emplacement" I'm sure. I was sort of fascinated by the mechanism and how the action worked. Andy and I spent a few minutes going over everything inside. The links were really cool. I even got artsy and took a desktop wallpaper pic of them.

So no updates for a while, then 50K of nonsense about a shooting trip. Next entry will be short, promise.