In the recent thread about HK suing the Airsofters, I mentioned that I received a lot of hate mail for the original Suck and Hate You post. Most of it isn’t very creative, so I don’t bother to pay much attention to it, but every now and then, I get a real gem.

Like Jim here.

I wrote you one of those hate mails, chum.

I’m not your chum.

At the time you were selling cheap, bargain basement chicom AK’s to your fan boys to pose with in the mirror in their underwear –

I sold guns that ranged from cheap to extremely expensive. The single most common gun I sold were Stag rifles that were usually in the $800-$900 range. Most of the cheap AKs were purchased by people who were on a tight budget.  

As for posing in the underwear, I had a strict policy to never ever ask about stuff like that. And guys, now that I’m not in the gun business, I still don’t want to know.

and you tried to tell them that junk was not only as good as an HK, but better!

And what HK civilian-friendly non-scalper-priced rifle should I have sold them instead?

Oh wait, there isn’t one. Moron.

Yep. I would take a good AK like a Vepr or a custom Saiga over a G3 absolutely anytime. But then again, unlike most of the internet, I actually like to shoot guns and not just brag about what I own. When I was competing in a lot of 3gun, I managed to kick some butt with a Vepr. The only modifications were a custom stock (that I made myself and I suck with woodworking, so it is very ugly) and Krebs Galil style sights because I was shooting limited (iron sights).  

On a different note, my shooting has gone to crap because of lack of practice time, but I’m finally going to get back into competition. I think I’m mostly going to do USPSA and IDPA because rifle ammo has gotten too expensive to practice with and I don’t want to raid my reserves. I remember when I used to buy cases of practice ammo for $75-$95, burn through a couple thousand rounds a month, and be a happy camper. Those were the good old days, but I digress.

I guess as long as it puts a buck in your pocket, there is no harm in some idiot thinking that a piece of junk is a high end rifle…

Hmm… Jim, if I’m such an evil capitalist pig like you think I am, why wouldn’t I try and sell that customer an $800 or $1,000 gun instead of a $400 one… (we did have a $3,300 USC turned UMP once, but nobody was dumb enough to buy that thing)

I see that the Mad Ogre…who wrote a contemptable piece entitled ‘Why I hate the AR15′ is now selling them and trying to cash in on the AR fad.

For some reason a lot of Mad Ogre hate always seems to run downhill to me. I think it is because we’re friends in real life. I can’t speak for George, but I also know Joe Chetwood, who is building guns with him at Crusader. He used to work for me. I haven’t seen any of their stuff, but they’re both good guys and I hope they do awesome.

You gun bloggers are pretty much whores – but I suspect the whores would have more credibility than you guys.

What’s with all the anti-whore hate? Are you still upset about that one that turned out to be a dude? 

For the record, I haven’t been in the gun business since 2008, and I’m not famous enough to get any free stuff.  Whatever you read on my blog is my opinion. Ironically most of the people like Jim haven’t actually read the original post. They skimmed it, made some crap up, and moved on. In reality I mostly complained about HK being overrated and having lousy service. (and terrible triggers and ergonomics and price… never mind). So I went ahead and posted a response in the Airsoft thread.

Got his second post this morning, and it made me decide that Jim was worthy of his own blog post.

Just givin’ ya some of your own back and saying some things that need to be said.

Well thank goodness somebody is willing to step up and defend the little guy!

Here’s a couple more: Do you think your suppliers will treat you better becuase you slag the crap out of them and their products? The guys at HK won’t sell you the time of day and I don’t blame ‘em.

Ironically their service sucked before I ever wrote the rant. Plus, hate to break it to you, but there isn’t a dark cabal of German arms dealers who have my picture pinned to the wall with daggers and they curse my name. I’m pretty sure that I’m not that famous, nor important.

You’re an ass!

The internets have spoken. Who am I to argue?

Yes, they have misgivings about selling to civvies. Who can blame them?

Uhh… Civilians?

This next line is where Jim earned his very own blog post!

The chicom/russo pricks that sell you those bargain basement Kalashnikovs also sell them to the pisslamic swine that kill our boys in the sand box every day. Nice business associates you have there chum.

You mean Osama gets his guns from Century Arms, Vector, or Robinson Armament? Bastards!

Good thing Jim set me straight. HK is wise to not sell guns to regular Americans, because those guns will only end up in the hands of Al Queda… Jim probably also believes that all the Mexican drug lord’s guns come from gun shows.

Let me make sure I got this right. So the AK is bad, because it was designed by Soviets who then sold it to bad people, and by extension American companies who build AKs and sell them to regular Americans are therefore bad too, but HK which was founded by fleeing Nazis is good, because they refuse to sell to regular Americans and only sell to governments, including bad ones. And government guns never turn up in the wrong hands…

Hate to break it to you Jim, but the “pisslamic” guys will use whatever they can get their hands on. And yes, we’ve caught them with HKs, as well as FNs, Enfields, Brens, BARs, and one of my friends kept a Tommy Gun in his Humvee after they captured it. Heck, somebody sent me a picture of a captured STG-44 once. The AK is just the most common gun in the world.

I have a couple HK’s, a Bushmaster and a Colt in my gun room – and not a single AK POS in sight.

Good for you. But are you sure that you want to start a pissing match about who owns what with a guy who used to own a gun store? I own a few guns. Some are very nice. A few were really expensive. But I don’t need to post and brag about owning fancy guns, because my ego isn’t attached to what I can afford, rather what I can outshoot you with.

And since you just said that you don’t own any AK POS, you might want to try a good one before you knock it. You might be surprised. I’ve owned guns from HK, FN, Bushmaster, Armalite, DSA, Rock River, Stag, Sig, STI, Kel-Tec, Colt, Marlin, Remington, Winchester, Robarms, Century, RAA, Kahr, Ruger, Springfield, Browning, CZ, S&W, and others that I can’t remember off the top of my head.  All of them had shortcomings in one way or another, some I liked better than others, and a few I will never part with.

I can afford to shoot good guns AND buy them from better men than you.

And I couldn’t sell you a gun anyway, (not being an FFL anymore in favor of being a novelist), so I’m not really out anything, but I’m sure that you are just an absolute joy for your local dealer. Plus we already know from your unfortunate hooker experience that you are an expert on men.

In any event, carry on. All I am seeing here is another self proclaimed gun expert trying to set himself up as some kind of authority on the subject. Your fan boys await. Cheers, Jim

Jim, I may be rude at times and I may have fans, (I’m still wrapping my brain around the MHI fan club on Facebook), but I don’t think I’ve ever claimed to be an expert. At the end of the day, I’ll still be who I am, and you’ll still be an elitist prick, looking down on people who can’t afford guns like the ones that you mistakenly paid too much for and sticking up for the European sentiment that thinks American civilians getting their rifles is equivalent to arming terrorists.

So long, chum. And by that, I mean the mass of smashed pulp and fish guts your argument stunk like.

First, to give this move a proper review I have to separate into a few different people.

 

Gun Nut Review: Public Enemies was friggin’ awesome in every way. Very seldom do we get treated to BAR action. Sure, you get some Thompsons in movies, but almost never BARs, and you can count on one hand how many times you’ve got a flick with Remington Model 8s, .351 Winchesters, Winchester Model 12s, 1897s, Military Springfields, sporterized Springfields, and all manner of period goodness.

 

Then the gun fights… Everybody knows that Michael Mann is about the only director in Hollywood that strives for absolute reality in his gunfights. He gave us the epic bank robbery in Heat. I’ve actually seen top of the line firearms instructors use the Hey Homie Is That My Briefcase scene from Collateral in classes. There were even some great gun bits in Miami Vice. And I think that Public Enemies is right up there.

 

When he dies… man, the shot that does in Dillinger was perfection, pure artistry written in violence. (oh crap, I didn’t say spoiler alert… but if you didn’t pay any attention in at all in school, you deserve to have your movie ruined… Yeah… Passion of the Christ, Jesus totally gets crucified in that one)

 

Michael Mann Fan Review: He’s the only guy that can use shaky cam the entire movie and not piss me off. I’ve heard some critics complaining about the use of digital, and how it takes them out of the movie… Shut up. Michael Mann could draw stick figures with crayons and then flip the pages real fast in front of the camera, and he’d still make a better movie than most of the imbeciles who make movies. Some critics have complained about the grit. Personally I like the feel. It puts you there. It doesn’t feel like you’re watching a Hollywood polished thing with Michael Mann, you feel like you’re on the streets of Chicago, or watching a coyote skulk across an LA road in the middle of the night, or that Crocket and Tubbs ain’t screwing around and will blow up some Cubans.

 

Someone else said that there was no character growth or development. Listen, you don’t watch a Michael Mann movie for character development. He tells stories about people who already are what they are, and then you follow them to their inevitable conclusion. I once had a critic come back after reading one of my action sequences, saying that they didn’t like it, because I never said how did the character “feel” during the action.  Feel? You kidding me? You’ve never been punched in the face before have you? You deal with it and feel later. Michael Mann’s characters have all been punched in the face. A lot.

 

My only pet peeve is that is really hard sometimes to figure out who somebody is supposed to be, because he likes to have people show up and not name them. It doesn’t really matter though, because they’re either bad bad guys, bad good guys, good bad guys, flawed good guys, or innocent bystanders.

 

Amateur 1930s Historian Review:  Okay, as some of you know I’m writing a book set during the Great Depression, so over the last year I’ve done copious research into the period from the turn of the century to the late 1930s. I’ve read stacks and stacks of books, and I love me some Wikipedia. I especially like the gangster period and some of the people that are in this movie are minor background characters in Grimnoir.   

 

Let’s just say that if you are going to look at Public Enemies with a microscope to make sure that it is 100% factually correct, you will be disappointed.  Look, if I can check my brain at the door, and not start picking events apart, you can too. Here I am, beating myself up, looking up the history of individual words to make sure they were in common usage in 1932, and Michael Mann has people dying years before they really did, dying at somebody else’s hand, throwing together multiple events (which did make for one bad ass action sequence though), and more.  So I’m sitting there, thinking to myself… Hmmm… Baby Face Nelson didn’t die like that… and he died after Dillinger… aww screw it, that was an awesome gun fight.

 

You guys just remember that when I totally screw up something in Hard Magic. I know my readers… Sure, I can have teleporting ninjas fighting on top of a burning super-dirigible armed with a Tesla super weapon that never existed and that’s cool, but heaven forbid if I have somebody drink a soda that wasn’t distributed for six more months. I don’t want angry e-mails telling me that a such and such wasn’t invented until 1933, or that so and so was dead in 1931, because I’ll say go to hell, mine’s fantasy/alternative history, and it went down different in my world!  If Michael Mann can do it, so can I!

Overall, I really liked it.

I read this essay recently. It is relatively well known. It was written in 1899, and it is just as true today.

A Message to Garcia

By Elbert Hubbard

In all this Cuban business there is one man stands out on the horizon of my memory like Mars at perihelion. When war broke out between Spain & the United States, it was very necessary to communicate quickly with the leader of the Insurgents. Garcia was somewhere in the mountain vastness of Cuba- no one knew where. No mail nor telegraph message could reach him. The President must secure his cooperation, and quickly.

What to do!

Some one said to the President, “There’s a fellow by the name of Rowan will find Garcia for you, if anybody can.”

Rowan was sent for and given a letter to be delivered to Garcia. How “the fellow by the name of Rowan” took the letter, sealed it up in an oil-skin pouch, strapped it over his heart, in four days landed by night off the coast of Cuba from an open boat, disappeared into the jungle, & in three weeks came out on the other side of the Island, having traversed a hostile country on foot, and delivered his letter to Garcia, are things I have no special desire now to tell in detail.

The point I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter and did not ask, “Where is he at?” By the Eternal! there is a man whose form should be cast in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor instruction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebrae which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly, concentrate their energies: do the thing- “Carry a message to Garcia!”

General Garcia is dead now, but there are other Garcias.

No man, who has endeavored to carry out an enterprise where many hands were needed, but has been well nigh appalled at times by the imbecility of the average man- the inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it. Slip-shod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference, & half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds, unless by hook or crook, or threat, he forces or bribes other men to assist him; or mayhap, God in His goodness performs a miracle, & sends him an Angel of Light for an assistant. You, reader, put this matter to a test: You are sitting now in your office- six clerks are within call.

Summon any one and make this request: “Please look in the encyclopedia and make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of Correggio”.

Will the clerk quietly say, “Yes, sir,” and go do the task?

On your life, he will not. He will look at you out of a fishy eye and ask one or more of the following questions:

Who was he?

Which encyclopedia?

Where is the encyclopedia?

Was I hired for that?

Don’t you mean Bismarck?

What’s the matter with Charlie doing it?

Is he dead?

Is there any hurry?

Shan’t I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself?

What do you want to know for?

And I will lay you ten to one that after you have answered the questions, and explained how to find the information, and why you want it, the clerk will go off and get one of the other clerks to help him try to find Garcia- and then come back and tell you there is no such man. Of course I may lose my bet, but according to the Law of Average, I will not.

Now if you are wise you will not bother to explain to your “assistant” that Correggio is indexed under the C’s, not in the K’s, but you will smile sweetly and say, “Never mind,” and go look it up yourself.

And this incapacity for independent action, this moral stupidity, this infirmity of the will, this unwillingness to cheerfully catch hold and lift, are the things that put pure Socialism so far into the future. If men will not act for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their effort is for all? A first-mate with knotted club seems necessary; and the dread of getting “the bounce” Saturday night, holds many a worker to his place.

Advertise for a stenographer, and nine out of ten who apply, can neither spell nor punctuate- and do not think it necessary to.

Can such a one write a letter to Garcia?

“You see that bookkeeper,” said the foreman to me in a large factory.

“Yes, what about him?”

“Well he’s a fine accountant, but if I’d send him up town on an errand, he might accomplish the errand all right, and on the other hand, might stop at four saloons on the way, and when he got to Main Street, would forget what he had been sent for.”

Can such a man be entrusted to carry a message to Garcia?

We have recently been hearing much maudlin sympathy expressed for the “downtrodden denizen of the sweat-shop” and the “homeless wanderer searching for honest employment,” & with it all often go many hard words for the men in power.

Nothing is said about the employer who grows old before his time in a vain attempt to get frowsy ne’er-do-wells to do intelligent work; and his long patient striving with “help” that does nothing but loaf when his back is turned. In every store and factory there is a constant weeding-out process going on. The employer is constantly sending away “help” that have shown their incapacity to further the interests of the business, and others are being taken on. No matter how good times are, this sorting continues, only if times are hard and work is scarce, the sorting is done finer- but out and forever out, the incompetent and unworthy go.

It is the survival of the fittest. Self-interest prompts every employer to keep the best- those who can carry a message to Garcia.

I know one man of really brilliant parts who has not the ability to manage a business of his own, and yet who is absolutely worthless to any one else, because he carries with him constantly the insane suspicion that his employer is oppressing, or intending to oppress him. He cannot give orders; and he will not receive them. Should a message be given him to take to Garcia, his answer would probably be, “Take it yourself.”

Tonight this man walks the streets looking for work, the wind whistling through his threadbare coat. No one who knows him dare employ him, for he is a regular fire-brand of discontent. He is impervious to reason, and the only thing that can impress him is the toe of a thick-soled No. 9 boot.

Of course I know that one so morally deformed is no less to be pitied than a physical cripple; but in our pitying, let us drop a tear, too, for the men who are striving to carry on a great enterprise, whose working hours are not limited by the whistle, and whose hair is fast turning white through the struggle to hold in line dowdy indifference, slip-shod imbecility, and the heartless ingratitude, which, but for their enterprise, would be both hungry & homeless.

Have I put the matter too strongly? Possibly I have; but when all the world has gone a-slumming I wish to speak a word of sympathy for the man who succeeds- the man who, against great odds has directed the efforts of others, and having succeeded, finds there’s nothing in it: nothing but bare board and clothes.

I have carried a dinner pail & worked for day’s wages, and I have also been an employer of labor, and I know there is something to be said on both sides. There is no excellence, per se, in poverty; rags are no recommendation; & all employers are not rapacious and high-handed, any more than all poor men are virtuous.

My heart goes out to the man who does his work when the “boss” is away, as well as when he is at home. And the man who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly take the missive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurking intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of doing aught else but deliver it, never gets “laid off,” nor has to go on a strike for higher wages. Civilization is one long anxious search for just such individuals. Anything such a man asks shall be granted; his kind is so rare that no employer can afford to let him go. He is wanted in every city, town and village- in every office, shop, store and factory. The world cries out for such: he is needed, & needed badly- the man who can carry a message to Garcia.

THE END-

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000028145065&ref=name

People have been bugging me to join up for awhile. I’ve gotten a bunch of invites, and today Bogie posted on this blog about it, telling me that if I’m trying to spread the word about the upcoming release of my book, I’m missing the boat by not being on Facebook.

I’ve kind of put it off, because I’m not really the social networking kind of guy. I’m more of a hermit in a compound surrounded by barb-wire and claymores type… well, not really that bad, but I am all about selling lots of books. I’m a capitalist like that.

Lo and behold, there is already an MHI group! http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000028145065&ref=name#/group.php?gid=99503651773&ref=mf Hunters Unite!

Okay, that was a little mind blowing. I’m still not entirely used to the idea of having fans, though it is pretty awesome.

Courtesty of Miguel, after I posted that I looked like James Gandolfini:

http://images.cheezburger.com/completestore/2009/7/1/128909314265746358.jpg

I’m just sayin’ is all…

I’ll have to take another picture, where I’ve got no glasses, no rifle, have a cigarette, and look like I’m about to beat you to collect protection money.