Neighbors Said he Had an Arms Cache and Used to go to Burger King With a Loaded Pistol

As my 4 loyal readers know, I got myself a Colt Woodsman pistol the other day. I got it to make up for the fact that someone stole a similar (but not as nice) pistol from my grandfather’s estate.

The gun turned out to have unexpected problems. I have written about it, but I feel like repeating myself in greater depth.

To start with, it absolutely refused to eject CCI Mini-mags. Everything else worked fine. I pictured myself searching the web for an ancient extractor spring and paying $300 for it.

I took the gun inside and Googled around. Eventually, I did what I should have done to begin with. I hosed the breech with Hornady One Shot, and I went through it with a Boresnake. Suddenly, I had a pistol that ejected Mini-mags.

The other problem was that the magazine was hard to load. Ordinarily, a .22 magazine will have a pretty soft spring. My gun’s spring was so stiff, it was impossible to get 10 rounds into the magazine. On top of that, my hands got sore from loading it.

The Woodsman is a 10-shot pistol. This is not something people dispute. So what was going on with the magazine?

I Googled around.

I found that I would be lucky to get another used magazine for under $60. I would more likely pay something like $85. When Colonel Colt made the Woodsman, he didn’t see fit to make a lot of magazines. Either that, or jerks bought them up by the dozens. Like coronavirus cowards hoarding toilet paper.

Yes, I know Colonel Colt was not alive when this gun was made.

Colt has made new magazines during this century, but of course, they stopped as soon as they heard I had a Woodsman.

I found aftermarket magazines, but the general consensus was that they were pretty bad, and since they ran around $40 each, they didn’t look too good.

Some dude on a forum said it was possible to make a Ruger Mk II magazine work. I looked into that. Before I got anywhere with the idea, I learned that Beretta had copied the Woodsman magazine for its Neos pistol. The Beretta magazine is 100% identical, except it’s stainless, it has a fat plastic base, and it has a plastic follower instead of steel. The little doodad at the lower end of the spring is different, but that’s picky. Anyway, it’s completely superior. It will never rust. Cost: $17-$20.

I ordered 4 Beretta magazines for the price of one Colt. Two arrived today. I took one to my workbench and opened it up. I stuck the base in my Panavise and Dremeled and filed it until the magazine fit the Colt correctly. Problem solved. If I really want to go first-class, I can get some sheet metal and make my own steel base that looks just like a Colt base. I can also blue the magazine so it looks original. I can’t do anything with the follower, but I think plastic followers are better, so who cares?

While I was doing all this, I took the Colt magazine apart. The spring was very different from the Beretta spring. It was shorter. I cut about an inch out of it and stuck it in the Beretta magazine (because I had reassembled the Colt magazine with the Beretta spring to see if it worked). I confirmed that it would compress more easily than before. Happiness. I then put the Colt parts and Beretta parts in their proper places. Now I have three viable magazines.

I ordered a replacement spring for the Colt magazine. The magazine is so valuable, it actually makes sense to spend 10 dollars on a spring. When it arrives, I’ll throw the altered spring out. I don’t know where it came from, but it’s not OEM, and there is no point in keeping it.

In other news, I got tired of the fiber optic sights in my Smith & Wesson SW22 Victory. They seemed fine in good light, but the other day I shot with the sun behind me, and it was hard to see what I was doing. I realized I had never had problems with ordinary sights. I found out Smith & Wesson makes plain old black sights, so I ordered them. They arrived today, and I installed them. Very nice. Not only do they lack annoying fiber optics; the front sight is skinny, so you can actually see where it is in relation to the target and the rear sight.

I have a new trigger on the way. I used to think the Smith & Wesson’s trigger was dandy, but going to the Smith & Wesson’s trigger after shooting the Colt is like divorcing Sofia Vergara and taking up with Ethel Merman. Pulling the Colt’s trigger is like snapping the stem on a Barbie-sized champagne glass.

When the new trigger gets here and I get it working, I hope to have a gun which in some way begins to measure up to the Woodsman.

When I got the SW22, I thought I had found an amazing bargain. I paid $319, if memory serves. Then I started buying stuff to make it work correctly. Grips. Smaller magazine followers to increase the capacity. Now I’m paying for sights and a trigger. I’ll probably have $500 in the gun before I’m finished.

Hmm. Now that I write that out, it actually sounds pretty good. I was going to complain, but I guess I can’t.

The SW22 will never be as elegant as the Colt, but it shoots very well, and with a real trigger and sights, it should be nearly as enjoyable.

Maybe I should get a red dot sight for it.

No. I won’t think of it.

Maybe.

I now have two .22 pistols which are ready to go, and things should get even better with the new trigger. On top of that, I just received several thousand CHOOT ‘EM Mini-mags, so it should be a while before I run out of quality ammunition.

The same people who are filling their spare rooms with toilet paper are also buying ammunition. Why? Do they plan to shoot sick people? Whatever the reason, I feel blessed to have found a good deal on the Mini-mags at the time I found it.

The big difference between them and me is that I don’t think I NEED .22 ammunition. I just want it. I don’t expect it to affect my odds of survival.

I guess if people in New York and San Francisco knew how much ammunition I have, people would be all over the web talking about my “firearms cache” and “thousands of rounds of ammunition.” People who are ignorant about guns need to understand something: ammunition is not cheap. The best way to buy it is online, and when you do, you need to buy a lot to offset the shipping cost. Also, there is nothing weird about wanting thousands of rounds. It’s easy to shoot 200 rounds in a day. I think Antifers and vegetarians must think we sit around thinking, “Let’s see. I want to shoot 2,000 people, so I better get…2000 rounds.” But these are the same people who think “assault weapon” is a real firearms term. The same folks who think a shotgun is the same thing as a rifle.

I probably have neighbors who have 10 or more times the ammunition I have.

I sure hope so. Those are the kind of neighbors I want. If someone comes here to do violence, I’m not going to get much help from male whale watchers in pink breast cancer awareness tights. What are they going to do to a criminal? Take off their panties and strangle him with them?

I just talked to my buddy Mike. He runs a hospice. He is as annoyed as I am. He said, “I’m real popular on the Internet right now.” He’s telling people to stop panicking and move on with life. He says restaurants in Massachusetts are about to close for at least 30 days, except for takeout. I wonder how the employees are supposed to pay their bills.

The sad thing about coronavirus is that even though it won’t kill many people, it’s apparently going to have the same economic impact as a real plague, simply because we’re panicking and killing our own economy. I guess FDR was right. We should fear fear itself. You don’t need a plague if people are going to roll over and give up just because of media hype.

I hope I don’t end up living on poached squirrels. Surely the grocery stores will stay open.

Here’s to being out of the loop. I wish everyone was as confident about coronavirus as I am.