Part utilitarian, part shrine, almost furniture: Grandpa’s gun cabinet always held fascinating treasures.
Even better, every item had its own special backstory.
Let’s face it — your gun safe is boring. Mine too, for many of the same reasons I’ll explain. It’s full of matte-black polymer rifles, a few optics you bought because some guy on YouTube told you to, and a mountain of gizmos you don’t really need.
Old school
Grandpa’s gun cabinet? It wasn’t so much about storage but more like a shrine — an oak-and-glass monument to a time when guns had a different role, hard-earned character, a certain aura and, above all, stories.
This short pontification is inspired by a recent GUNS Magazine Podcast. In episode #298, Roy Huntington and I discussed the changes in gun culture over the years and were instantly reminded — yet again — some AR owners don’t accept anything less than glowing praise about their favorite “weapon system.”
Roy and I have taken every possible pain to explain we don’t hate ARs; in fact, between us, we probably have several dozen, yet the angry comments keep coming.
Guns such as grandpa’s Lefever Nitro double-barrel 20 gauge have more character in their splinter fore-end
than an entire cabinet full of black rifles — never mind the stories it represents!
In such remarks, the writers are unconsciously reinforcing the negative stereotypes of certain shooters as they completely miss the point by at least 50 MOA. What we were trying to analyze is the significant changes in how shooters relate to firearms nowadays.
There is nothing wrong with our “modern” gun culture, but anyone with an ounce of honesty will admit the all-encompassing black rifle and pistol craze has a dull, certain sameness. They’re useful, yes, and there is a certain beauty in function over form, but generally the word to describe them is “monotonous.”
Down home
Grandpa’s gun cabinet was so much different. Open the door and you were hit with the glorious sweet petroleum aroma of old-formula Hoppe’s No. 9, 3-in-1 oil, aged walnut and maybe a trace of cigar smoke. Your safe smells like plastic, silica packs and unfilled dreams.
Grandpa didn’t own five ARs that are identical except for different bolt carrier groups. His cabinet was the firearms version of the Whitman Sampler (look it up).
The stereotypical “load out” included a lever gun with honest bluing wear from countless deer seasons, a pump shotgun with a small crack in the stock that still dropped birds every fall, and a .22 rifle that taught three generations how to shoot.
There was also a center-fire bolt-action rifle, maybe an old 98-pattern or a 1908 surplus Springfield. On these workaday guns, every nick, scratch and dent had a story attached.
Grandpa’s gun cabinet drawer often held a museum of old dog-eared, half-filled cartridge boxes,
each representing something interesting.
Even the ammo shelf was cooler. Grandpa stocked cartridges with names you’ve only heard of — .300 Savage, .257 Roberts, maybe a half-empty box of .32-20 that hadn’t been made since before you were born. These cartridges were for guns he used to own but (regretfully) sold years ago, while those partial boxes of ammo were kept “just in case.”
For pap, buying ammo wasn’t a bulk-online experience seeking the lowest cost per round of “commodity” calibers — it meant going to the hardware store and asking for a certain dusty green-and-yellow box behind the counter.
Furnishings
And there was the cabinet itself. It wasn’t a giant steel monolith hiding in the basement or closet. It was a piece of furniture, often prominent in the dining room or front hallway, with a plate-glass front and a tiny brass lock that wouldn’t stop a semi-determined raccoon.
The lock was primarily to keep the kids and other semi-honest people out of the guns without adult supervision, and it worked well, even though certain unkempt children wondered if a paper clip or bent wire would trip the simple mechanism. Yet, I — sorry, I meant to say “those kids” — never tried it because it would break an important trust with somebody you never wanted to disappoint.
The glass front made a dangerous yet reassuring rattle when you opened it, a hollow jangling noise you can’t describe but one you’d recognize instantly. While not flashy, the whole thing was essentially a monument to the household armory. Grandpa wasn’t ostentatious, but he was quietly proud of his guns.
Ever “need” a 16-gauge bolt action Mossberg 190? The best place to find one was Grandpa’s gun cabinet!
Heart of the matter
The coolest thing about Grandpa’s cabinet wasn’t even the firearms within; it was the stories. When he opened that door, you didn’t just gain access to firearms—history came pouring out. “This one kept the coons out of the chicken coop back on the farm,” he pointed out.
Up until the 1950s, a fox or hawk snatching a chicken was nearly as serious as someone kidnapping a kid today because it meant soup for dinner. “This one’s been to deer camp every year since Eisenhower,” he said with a certain wistful tone, as you considered he hadn’t gone deer hunting in years. But, no matter…
Your safe just beeps angrily if you punch in the wrong code twice.
You’ll never know what you’ll find but treasures abound in Grandpa’s gun cabinet!
Long memories
Spend all you want on Cerakote, carbon fiber and aircraft aluminum, but you can’t buy Grandpa’s perspective, the experiences or the miles he put on those guns. His cabinet was cooler because it wasn’t just about what was inside — it was about the man who kept them, the history of a life he and his guns lived, and the stories he passed down every time he turned the little brass key.
My own grandkids will grow up with shooting memories of polymer handguns, beeping keypads and digital displays, but it just won’t be the same — and I think we’re all poorer because of it.
Categories
Me
“Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan” is my second favorite science fiction movie after “Aliens.” Had the M41A Pulse Rifle been in the hands of Peewee Herman, “Aliens” still would have been the coolest movie in human history. “The Wrath of Khan” earns its spot because of the amazing 1982 analog special effects combined with Ricardo Montalban’s epic pecs (which were real, by the way).
All real men are smitten with the concept of space combat. Nobody does that better than “The Expanse.” The folks who made that series put a great deal of effort into getting the physics right. If you haven’t seen it, “The Expanse” is nailing 95% on the Tomatometer and is available on Amazon Prime. Check it out. You’ll thank me later.
As cool as “Aliens,” “Star Trek,” and “The Expanse” are, none of that is actually real. However, on January 24, 1975, the Soviets test fired the first legit orbital space cannon. This modified 23mm antiaircraft gun loosed twenty rounds in three bursts pointed Lord-knows-where. Given that there is no air friction in space, the Russkies likely dropped those 20 high explosive shells into some benevolent alien’s afternoon picnic someplace. Tragically, humanity has gone to war over stupider things.
Details
In the 1970s, the U.S. and the USSR were locked in the Space Race. The Russians smoked us when they launched Yuri Gregarin into low Earth orbit in April of 1961. Then Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin told the Commies to suck it from the surface of the moon eight years later. By the mid-1970s the metric to beat was an inhabitable orbital space station.
Our own Skylab went up in May of 1973. However, the Russians beat us to it with their first Salyut (“Fireworks”) space station in 1971. Now faced with the prospect of Americans and Russians occupying the same vast reaches of infinite space, the Soviets naturally began scheming how to blow us to pieces over it.
Salyut wasn’t much of a space station. This thing was thrown together out of Soyuz components just to win the race. The Salyut was cramped and fairly miserable. However, in their defense, they did orbit seven of the things. Four of these were nominally there for respectable research purposes. The remaining three were Almaz (“Diamond”) military spy stations.
Origin Story
Aleksandr Nudelman of the KB Tochmash design bureau in Moscow got the tasker to build the world’s first orbital space cannon to defend the Almaz stations from imaginary American attacks. Nudelman and his team began with a 14.5mm automatic gun that weighed 37 pounds and could accurately engage terrestrial targets up to a mile away. This was adapted from the KPV antiaircraft gun that the Russians used as primary armament on their BTR and BRDM armored personnel carriers.
The KPV formed the basis for the family of towed ZPU antiaircraft guns as well. It cycled at 600 rounds per minute and was a proven and effective short-recoil design that should function just fine in outer space. However, Nudelman’s mob eventually decided on something with a bit more authority.
Proper Defensive Weaponry
The final operational version was a 23mm beast called the R-23M Kartech (“Buckshot”). This fast-firing weapon was adapted from the tail gun on the Tupolev Tu-22 Blinder supersonic strategic bomber. The R-23M Kartech was a curious gas-operated, single-barrel weapon that incorporated four individual chambers like a revolver. The gun fired 23x260mm telescoped ammunition at 2,500 rpm. Muzzle velocity hovered around 2,800 feet per second.
The R-23M was fitted in a fixed mount along the centerline of the station. There was an optical sight mounted in the spacecraft’s cockpit. To aim the thing, cosmonauts had to orient the entire space station. Actually touching it off was where the real fun started.
Physics is a Cruel Mistress
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. That’s not just a good idea, that’s the law. This is the reason full-power 12-gauge buckshot rounds are adequate to peg your funmeter after a long day on the range. This gets even worse in zero gravity with no air.
Smokeless powder contains an oxidizer that provides its own oxygen. Modern cartridge-firing weapons will shoot just fine in a vacuum. The problem is what to do when the recoil from that 23mm gun sends your sparkly new spaceship hurtling toward Uranus.
They only fired the thing once and then only remotely. The station was de-crewed and about to plunge into the earth’s atmosphere to be incinerated at the time.
The Russians are so paranoid they still haven’t declassified the results of that firing test. However, back in 1975, our communist friends really did unlimber their R-23M Kartech space cannon for real, quite effectively lighting up the final frontier.
