Edith Roosevelt Derby being held by her grandfather, Theodore Roosevelt
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7 Guns to Avoid in 2024
by Lee Williams
Saturday was supposed to be a big sales day for Lock N’ Load Firearms, which is located in Southington, Connecticut. The gun shop has two major sales each year, and Saturday was its “Customer Appreciation Day.” The store spent a lot on advertising the event and on party goods. Several vendors came out for the sale.
The fun ended around 11:40 a.m., when the state’s computer system went down, and it stayed down throughout most of the day.
Josh, who works at the gun shop, estimates they lost thousands of dollars.
“Guns aren’t $200 or $300 anymore. They cost $600 or $800,” he said. “To set up an event like that, all the advertising, and then to not be able to sell firearms definitely hurt us. But here, it happens all of the time.”
The State of Connecticut does not allow gun dealers to run their own NICS computer checks. It insists on running the checks for them, as well as a half-dozen other state checks.
Josh said the state’s computer shutdowns are becoming far too common.
“I don’t know how to hold the state accountable,” he said. “I hate to think that a lawsuit is the answer, but that’s where we are at. We can’t flip the state reps and senators to get more fair representation at the state capitol.”
Matt, who works at The Gun Store in Waterbury, Connecticut, said the state’s computer shutdowns have become “random but consistent.”
“You can expect to go down every couple of days,” Matt said. “It’s more than I’ve ever experience in the past 20 years. I’m not saying that the State of Connecticut is intentionally doing it, but it’s been consistent enough lately.
If only they used NICS and circumvented all the other six or seven checks they use. The problem is that the state legislature added all these checks. It’s created massive amounts of confusion.”
Common names, he said, like “John Smith” have become a serious issue for the state’s computer systems, which lack the clarity of a NICS Unique Personal Identification Number or UPIN, which gun owners can apply for.
“If they have a NICS UPIN, you find out quickly that it’s not the ‘John Smith’ wanted for murder in Idaho,” he said.
At Central Connecticut Arms in Portland, Connecticut, staffer Ronnie said the shop lost thousands of dollars.
“We couldn’t sell any firearms. It was not a very good day,” he said. “Some customers put their purchases on layaway, which helped.”
The state had another major shutdown just a few weeks ago, Ronnie said.
“We were down for three days. They don’t explain when it’s going to be back up,” he said. “We just sit around here hoping it will be back up soon. It’s a major pain in the ass, man.”
Holly Sullivan is president of the Connecticut Citizens Defense League and serves on the board of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
She said there is growing speculation on whether the shutdown was an effort to prevent state residents from purchasing firearms.
“Unlike other states, FFLs are not allowed to use the NICS system themselves. The State of Connecticut acts as a middleman between the FFLs and the NICS system,” she said.
“The state does NICS and state-level checks. Usually, if there’s an IT issue, every FFL gets an email. None were sent on Saturday. This ‘breakdown’ was unusual. Generally, the state will say it’s an IT issue, but they didn’t do that this time.”
Hundreds of Connecticut gun shops were affected, she said.
“This is a symptom of a much larger problem,” she said. “The state wants to control us, but they’re not adequately doing their job. They don’t trust FFLs to do their job. People are denied their Constitutional rights. Let’s say if someone works offshore, it could be months before they get this opportunity again. And besides, Saturday at noon is prime time to buy guns!”
The state has an extreme anti-gun history, Sullivan explained.
“Attorney General William Tong—his hobby is being anti-gun,” she said. “Every legislative session, every anti-gun bill was proposed by Tong. And then he’d bring in his Mom’s Demand action crew. It’s an ongoing problem. Dealers lost a lot of money.”
Neither Connecticut Attorney General Tong nor Connecticut Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection commissioner Ronnell A. Higgins, whose office is responsible for conducting the background checks, returned calls seeking their comments for this story.
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We reported last month that several anti-gun measures that were still under consideration as California’s legislative session closed remained on track to be considered when lawmakers reconvened on August 3.
Five bad bills clear appropriations — now on to the floor
Now, five of those measures have, indeed, been passed in committee and are eligible for floor votes in the state Senate and Assembly.
According to a legislative update by the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action, three bad Assembly bills were passed by the Senate Appropriations Committee and are now eligible for a vote on the Senate floor.
AB 1743 expands the database that leaked CCW holder data in 2022
Assembly Bill 1743 expands the state’s firearm owner data-sharing framework by increasing access to information maintained in California’s Automated Firearms System and related databases.
“Expanding this system raises significant concerns given California’s track record of protecting firearm owner data,” NRA-ILA explained. “In 2022, the California Department of Justice exposed the personal information of thousands of firearm owners and concealed carry permit holders in a widely reported data breach.”
AB 1753 expands red flag laws under the guise of “clarification”
AB 1753 “clarifies” California’s Gun Violence Restraining Order (GVRO) violation framework by explicitly subjecting ammunition possession to the same hearing and enforcement procedures currently applied to firearms.
“Red flag laws have repeatedly stripped law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights while undermining basic due process protections,” NRA-ILA wrote. “Existing red flag laws in California should not be expanded under the guise of ‘clarification,’ but repealed.”
AB 2047 goes after 3D printers — the same play as New York’s Hochul law
Finally, AB 2047 targets 3-dimensional printers by restricting their sale or transfer unless equipped with so-called “firearm blueprint detection algorithms.”
“The bill represents a broad attack on lawful technology and raises concerns about free speech, innovation and the rights of law-abiding Californians,” NRA-ILA reported. “These concerns are not just realized by firearm owners, but tens of thousands of STEM educators and technology professionals.”
firefly
There’s accumulating guns—and then there’s collecting. The thing that distinguishes the latter from the former is that there’s generally a theme to a collection. It’s not that one’s better than the other, and there’s often a fair bit of overlap, but collectors generally have a running list in their head of desired acquisitions; the next “Grail gun” to add to the safe, if you will.
This used to be more difficult in the olden times. However, along came the various web forums, whether brand-centric, themed around a certain type of shooting sport or hunting or specific to a state or other geographic location. Collecting, say, Rugers or Smith & Wessons became a lot easier when you could peruse the buy/sell/trade board on a Ruger or Smith & Wesson fan site.
Then came the auction sites. If you weren’t aware, in its earliest days, eBay actually allowed the listing of firearms before getting cold feet at the regulatory and political morass and pulling out in 1999. The market vacuum was quickly filled by specialized firearm-auction sites. These days, if one has a sufficient bank balance and some leisure time to surf the internet, a lot of the drama and suspense has been taken from the previously intriguing hunt for the next piece in a collection.
While this is convenient, it somehow feels less than—well, sporting.
Having come up in that earlier world as something of a casual collector, I feel like something’s been lost, at least in regard to the things that made it feel fun to me. The two big variables were availability and affordability.
It was easy to control for affordability. If one was making only gun-counter-clerk wages in the 1990s, one knew that the Colt Pythons and Peacemakers or Smith & Wesson Registered Magnums and Triple-Locks were pretty much off the table, but post-war S&W Hand Ejectors or the more common varieties of Colt autoloaders were still in the attainable range. Furthermore, unless you were attending major auctions or had some other sort of “in,” the playing field was pretty well level.
If you’re a bazillionaire with the ability to quickly scan all the auction sites for whatever rare $15K Luger variant tickles your fancy and buy every copy for sale in the U.S. right now, I won’t lie: I’m a little bit envious. But, that also kinda feels like some 19th century “hunt” with a sahib paying to shoot a tiger chained to a post.
Now, I will confess to the gun-collecting equivalent of “hunting over bait,” in that I spent many a year working behind the counters of gun shops, which is where people bring in guns to sell or trade. I well remember, back in the height of my military-surplus collecting phase, standing in the gunsmithing shack at work, chatting with the ’smiths about something work-related, when one of our regulars dipped in the back to show off the rifle he’d just acquired as part of a collection.
“Bet y’all haven’t seen one of these before,” he drawled. I looked it up and down. It had a large-ring Mauser action, a deep belly to the stock around the magazine, and a sliding sheet-metal cover over the bolt reminiscent of that on an Arisaka.
“OHMIGOD!” I squealed, “A Siamese 1903 Mauser!”
In retrospect, I’m pretty sure he was expecting this reaction from me, but, to be fair, I hadn’t seen a Siamese Mauser outside of some black-and-white photos in collectors’ guides and a few bubbaized sporters.
I checked the contents of my pockets and then scuttled off to a corner of the gunsmithing shack to pull out my phone and dial 1-800-AM-I-BROKE to see if my paycheck had cleared. It had, and I was soon a proud Siamese Mauser owner.
This is the sort of thrilling collecting I remember. It was like seeing that once-in-a-lifetime buck come strolling out of the woods when you’re expecting a dull afternoon and reading a comic book in the tree stand to kill time before going back to tell lies around the campfire. Someone nowadays might plug “Mauser, Siamese” into a search engine on an auction site, but it’s just not the same.
If you want to do it the easy way, I’m not going to hate on you—well, not publicly at least. But, I will tell you that there are some intermediate steps that can greatly aid your collectible chops without completely outright throwing in the towel on your amateur status.
The first and easiest is developing a relationship with your local FFL, the one with whom you do the most of your business. I know my current collecting mania, Smith & Wesson semi-automatics, has benefitted from the fact the guys at Indy Arms Company know that’s my jam and I’ll get a call if one they think I’d like turns up for sale.
When I’m working in sales, I keep a list of my regular customers and their particular proclivities; no sense letting some World War II Walther P-38 languish in the case when I know I can call Norm Smith and he’ll swing by on the way home from work to grab it.
In fact, at the first shop where I worked, we had one of those sorts of regulars who’d hang out on Saturday mornings and even help behind the counter a bit when things got busy. He’d travel for work and we’d let him have a couple photocopies of the shop FFL. That way, when he was out checking out the local gun stores and pawn shops for antique Colts during his off hours, he could just hand them the FFL copy and have his discovery shipped to us.
This is the good, old-fashioned shoe-leather work that makes the “fair chase” style of gun collecting so much fun; checking the used counters at local shops and trawling the tables at the local gun show. Ducking into unfamiliar shops when you’re on the road to scope the inventory of used and collectible pieces. Networking with other collectors.
Once, while perusing the “Standard Catalog of Smith & Wesson” with my friend Marko, we came across the description of the Performance Center Model PC13, described as “a very serious carry revolver.” Marko was immediately smitten.
“One of these might be at the show this weekend!” he surmised hopefully.
“Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt. It says right here they made only 200 of them five years ago. What’re the odds one’ll be there?”
Pretty good, as it turned out.
You just can’t get that kind of excitement scrolling a mouse pointer across a screen. You gotta get out there and hunt.