Son of a gun

Spectator.us ^ | 19 May, 2021 | James Panero

[marktwain]

In his late-middle age, my father cultivated more of the interests of the old neighborhood. His kitchen overflowed with pasta makers and deli slicers. His prep table was taken over by a home wine-making operation; we ate our meals beside a glass carboy as it bubbled up fermented gas. And scattered about the living room, tucked in the bookcases and stashed behind the coffee table, he positioned an array of locked cases and bags containing a growing collection of rifles, pistols and shotguns.

The acquisitions that came to fill our Upper West Side apartment mainly came from the shops around Little Italy. Home winemaking was once common among Italian Americans. So too was a well-developed sense for gun culture. There was a time when riflery and marksmanship were encouraged across America, after all. Look at any high school yearbook from a century ago and you will likely find a picture of the student gun club. For Americans of Italian descent, an affinity for firearms was a patriotic necessity. The Risorgimento, the fight for Italian reunification, remained a recent memory. In the 1850s, after a first unsuccessful effort, the Italian general Giuseppe Garibaldi had regrouped in Staten Island, bringing with him his partisan supporters, including, so the story goes, my great-great-great-grandfather, a Piedmontese from Cuneo in northern Italy. Loyalty, combat readiness and virtù, have long remained in the blood.

In our family lore, the Papal states and the Napoleonic empire were all variously to blame for giving Italy the boot. Our quarrel with Rome went back to the tale of Ugolino della Gherardesca, the Count of Donoratico and our Pisan progenitor, who became caught up in that unfortunate Guelph-Ghibelline business of the 13th century and was framed by a Popish plot. The denouement found Ugolino deposited in the lowest circle of Dante’s Inferno,

[marktwain]

Interesting tale of gun culture in New York City.

[LIConFem]

My dad went to high school in manhattan during WWII. He was in the school’s rifle club (or whatever they called it). They used to shoot .22 right in the gymnasium.

Strangely enough, he turned out to be something of an anti-gunner, although it wasn’t an issue that ever swayed his vote one way or the other.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I had a friend who graduated from Bishop DuBois High School in Manhattan in the 1950’s. He was on the rifle team, and they used to carry their rifles at sling arms on the subway up to the Knightsbridge Armory in the Bronx for practice and competition. It was probably illegal in those days. One time, a transit cop (the transit authority used to have their own police force) asked them what they were doing, but didn’t make a fuss about it. If a teenager with a rifle (especially a “white supremist”!) showed up in the subway with a rifle the whole damn island of Manhattan would be on lockdown.

[marktwain]

Yes.

The really big push to disarm Americans did not occur until the 1960’s, when the power of the Mediacracy waxed high.

[M1903A1]

John Jovino is legendary/infamous among Lee-Enfield rifle collectors. Besides importing many of them from overseas in a more enlightened era (i.e. pre-1968), he also assembled them from loose parts (sometimes creating implausible rifles in the process) that are still known in the Enfield community as “Jovinos” or “JJ Specials”.

[mylife]

take da gun, leave da lambrusco

[T.B. Yoits]

Italians in the New York City area still foster a gun culture. Louis and Anthony Imperato founded Henry Repeating Arms which has a production facility in Bayonne New Jersey, right across the Hudson River from Manhattan, New York.

Henry Repeating Arms, although in the United States, continues in a line of great Italian gun manufacturers including some of the better known ones; Benelli, Beretta, Franchi, and Uberti.

[Bonemaker]

[frog in a pot]

The really big push to disarm Americans did not occur until the 1960’s, when the power of the Mediacracy waxed high.

Quite right. The Left both inside and outside of the country tailored and coordinated its many unrelated efforts and turned in full force on us. The media joined in and provided as 24/7 background music its fraudulent version of the VN war.

The media's current 24/7 dishonest portrayal of Left's wins in the recent election, its high praise for an obviously inept president and its almost total silence as to a leftist administration's aggressive implementation of anti-MAGA policies reaches a new high-water mark.

It is, however, a matter of first impression for many of today's middle-aged voters, indeed for many perhaps unnoticeable.

[Disambiguator]

Some really nice reproduction “Old West” firearms are made in Italy.

[Big Red Badger]

Dragoons are
A Fun piece
To Shoot!

[Who is John Galt?]

...when the Smith and Wesson company debuted its .50 caliber five-shot revolver (the Model 500), my father was first in line to purchase one. He lived and died an avowed atheist, but he believed in stopping power. The gun was designed to stop a bear in its tracks. It could also ‘put a bullet through an engine block’, he liked to say. When we finally tested it together at a sandpit in the free state of Vermont, the pistol felt like a piece of personal artillery. A flaming shockwave emanated from the end of its barrel and expanded in a cone of heat and light.

I've often wished someone would produce an affordable lever gun in .500 S&W...

;^)