Sometimes, You Buy the Gun; Sometimes, You Buy the Story
Born to Loose
At 12 meters from a simple rest, my liberated thug gat shoots plenty straight.
I’m addicted to online law enforcement seizure gun auctions. Some folks struggle with prescription opiates, cigarettes, or pornography. For me, it’s gun auctions. Decent collectible guns will often command decent collectible gun prices. However, sometimes you find some reasonably priced gems.
Details
The fact that these sales exist at all is like sand on the eyeball for Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. Particularly for smaller law enforcement agencies, it is a daily grind to keep the organization running in the black. In my own little town, we have held civic fundraisers to buy body armor for the local fuzz. There is something poetic about the SWAT team charging into harm’s way behind a ballistic shield that was purchased by fourth graders. One way for police agencies to turn a little extra coin is by selling confiscated firearms.
The Leftists of the world naturally consider this utter sacrilege. If you view all guns as evil and any firearm taken out of circulation as a net win, then anything that reverses that trend is obviously of the Devil. However, 328 million Americans already own more than 400 million firearms. This is spitting in the ocean.
This particular example began life as a Parkerized Rock Island Armory GI Standard MS in .45 ACP — a full-size frame mated to a stubby slide with a 4.25″ barrel. The gun comes with fixed low-profile GI sights. The end result is reliably reliable and looks cool to boot. New in box, this gun sports an MSRP of $549. However, I didn’t buy this pistol for its pedigree. I bid on this piece for the story.
Specifics
I have seen pistol grips cut from rare exotic woods, bone, antler, mammoth ivory and meteorites. These, however, had none of that. They were clearly crafted by a criminal.
The online photos each had a spot of electrical tape strategically applied to keep the auction family-friendly. However, it did not take a great deal of imagination to tease out the details. Plastered across each side of the weapon was a surprisingly well-executed rendition of the Punisher emblem. However, there was also the sort of word you would never utter in the presence of your grandmother. In fact, say this particular word twice in a PG13 movie, and that film automatically becomes an R.
Philosophical Musings
I once attended a young man in the emergency department with a fresh gunshot wound. His youthful body was artificially aged with the stigmata of a life lived fast and hard. He had clearly spent some time in prison and had the tats to prove it. Slathered across his right pectoral in that classic jailhouse scrawl was “Born to Loose!”
Beyond the fact that this kid was struggling with a couple of extra holes that God had not put there in the first place, at some point, he had thought it a good idea to have his cellie mark up his chest with a guitar string needle and some blue ink by Bic. In their enthusiasm, they failed to engage spell check. “Born to Lose!” would have been bad enough. “Born to Loose!” was simply Homerian.
Similarly, the anonymous former owner of this obscene 1911 pistol had decided to express himself uniquely in the grips. The Punisher iconography was actually quite well-executed. The ace of spades added a spot of flair. The grammatical error, however, just turbocharged the whole thing.
Grand Scheme
There are 1.9 million people incarcerated in the USA. That’s one out of every 173 Americans. By any reasonable metric, that’s just sad.
American prisons are not filled with psychopaths. There are a few, to be sure, and they make great fodder for lurid Netflix documentaries. However, rank-and-file convicts are not cannibals or blood-crazed lunatics. They just have poor impulse control.
This customized heater likely looked right awesome, poking jauntily out of those low-slung britches. Then, it likely looked pretty awkward when presented as evidence to a jury. I will forever imagine the details, but it probably earned the poor shmuck another six months at sentencing.
This criminal-owned, cop-seized Rock Island Armory M1911 assumes a prime spot in my own collection. No offense to General Patton, but I tend to eschew profanity myself. My personal arsenal is PG13 at worst, so I sourced a strip of Velcro to obscure the F-bomb. At some point, my mom might wander by.
This pitiful, obscene gun provides a tantalizing window into a darker, uglier world — a world of failing education and a social situation awash in tragedy. However, I like it, I really do, in some ways more than the top-flight expensive stuff that sits to its right and to its left. Sometimes, you buy the gun. Sometimes, you buy the story.
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