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I have no less than three incoherent rants in drafts "replying" to this small bit of wisdom.
Really.
No, REALLY!
I reply in detail to the specific things she's said above about my specific purchasing decisions... Wait, what?
WHAT specific things?
Whir click. Whir click. Whir click.
Thag, you dumbass, she's said nothing about you or anything you've done and if you're feeling she has; maybe it's YOUR problem and not HERS!
Maybe I bought too much shit on a stick when it came to holsters finding what worked for me and I'm defensive.
It can't be an emotional response to the .25 ACP hoard, I went into that dank hole knowing how shitty some of those guns are.
She is, however, definitely speaking about how Marv decides his gun related purchases...
Tam is 'witty', she's intelligent, informed and … opinionated, but like you hint, she doesn't always mean what 'we' interpret her words to say (parse that sentence if you can – but I know what I mean even if nobody else does).
ReplyDeleteWhat she says is generally true, for some, in the particular (often 'very') specific situation she's addressing but she'd be the first to point out the fact that the entire opposite is true in other situations. (She's bluntly honest and … just a bit 'scary' … whilst I’d get down on one knee right now and propose to 'Roomie' if she wasn't out of my league. Sigh!). The impression I get is that she'd be the last one to ever claim any overweening 'expertise' or 'special insight' either – she just states her opinion.
Contrarily, my experience/observation is that mostly Americans would fight to buy the $4 turd-on-a-stick over a $2 chocolate one … but only if it was 'fashionable' (in this sense, bought by 'the right' people 'the names', with a tactical stick with rails, probably painted in Realtree, 'made in America' even if it wasn't, and offered in a calibre beginning with a 4, CNC milled from a solid American manufactured steak'n'grits based turd-billet - “Sheeit, we don't want any of those darn Yuropeon 9mm 'pasta-based' turds. No sirree!”). So buying with some 'fiscal concern' would seem, to me, to be more unusual.
We've all (including the Queen of Snark I’d guess) made some 'doubtful' purchases, for even more debatable 'reasons' (price being one of 'my' major factors for anything. Duh!) but some of the best, and most used equipment/kit I've got has often also turned out to be the 'more reasonably priced' (due to not being from a name-brand – hey a lot of my kit comes from unknown Finnish/Norwegian/Swedish and even Estonian 'copies' of others designs – quality, built to last in severe environments and with no 'manufacturers mark-up for marketing purposes'. Check out 'where is the liquor', I mean www.varusteleka.com/en for cold-weather gear and get a 'Skrama' knife at least – the absolute best!).
I doubt any of your choices/purchases are based 'purely' on price, any more than mine are (OK there 'may' have been a 'couple', Gulp!). Have we bought some (subsequently embarrassing to admit) 'complete dogs'? Hell yes (more than I care to admit), but I've also got a large collection of bargains too.
(.25? At least the 'worst' I went for was 7.65x21 para. Hey, there were a bunch of Portuguese PPK's going cheap and … Bond?!? lol)
One of the rants boiled down to quite often the customer is asking for something brown impaled on a pieces of wood, so chocolate is just an extra-cost option bringing more than is asked for to the table.
DeleteAnother is about how jaded we've become over people touting the newest latest and greatest and expensive items. 5.11 Tacticool I am looking at you! And there's been some serious snobbery over pants on some sites. As I indicated at one point, the 5.11 pants sure are nice, but they're not three to five times as nice as Wrangler. The less said about belts the better.
The third rant is about holsters, which you will note she does not mention, and how hard it was to find one that worked for me. My disability and my car preclude a couple of carry modes that are just the bee's knees for (it seems) every gun writer on the planet. Tam is a gun writer, therefore RAGE!
I am so very glad I noticed that these were MY issues before hitting publish. I hope to beat them into something I can post before long though, taking the RAGE out of course.
I think a more accurate observation would be that if one company offers a chocolate cupcake, called a Chocolate Cupcake, for 10$ and another company offers the exact same cupcake, but with a "Stealth, radar absorbent coating" and a rail for mounting a combination sonar transponder and cup holder, and calls their cupcake the Nightfang Deathstalker Baked Assault Confection, for 100$, the American gun buying public will order Nightfang Confections by the dozen while the Cupcakes get job lotted to J & G Rifle Ranch for mark down.
ReplyDeleteOh Great, I've been 'outed'. Why, because I really quite fancy a Nightfang Deathstalker Baked Assault Confection with Stealth, radar absorbent coating (aren't you just drooling at the thought too?). But being 'cheap' I'll probably just settle for my usual basic Assault Muffin (with its DIY Optifade icing decoration), 12 ga currants I hasten add, I'm not a wuss or woman to settle for 20 ga. I guess I'm as susceptible to advertising spiel as the next.
ReplyDeleteBut that's probably as an astute an observation as any I’ve seen. (I wonder though if some of it is similar to the 'difficulty' women supposedly have in 'paying more' for 'womens' products. You know, they pay over the odds for a pink razor that is functionally identical to the much cheaper blue mens razors … purely because its pink. To buy a bog-standard muffin is to admit you're … not a member of the clique and are 'abnormal').
Jaded? Hmm, yes, our whole culture has become one of the 'disposable' and newest fad being all. Outside of limited 'tech' areas the newest is hardly ever 'any' better (and often the complete opposite) but … 'it's cool/fashionable'. (Me? I still generally hang onto my old Browning HP as that's what I trained with, or a P226 since that's what they supply me with now, that and a C8. But … I still chuckle at looking at all the 'modern' brouhaha about 6.8 and the ilk when I consider my 'very' old EM2 and its .280 British, arguably much superior and invented … 50 years ago. Much that is a new 'fashion' is simply the repackaging of older, and better, offerings those in the know still flock to. Some better materials or manufacturing processes but just how much better are almost all modern offerings than what was available 50 or 100 years ago? And may JMB bless you!). But as above that reveals that 'we've' become a culture that values form over function, appearance over substance, pretence over fact. And isn't that depressing?
Holsters are a 'sore point' for me too. I have some 'restricted mobility' due to old 'ballisticly implanted body piercings' so positioning is 'difficult', so much so I generally have to use a custom made (by an old Sami guy in Northern Sweden for my share of an elk we'd potted) reindeer leather OWB with a 'rather drastic' cant. Given my druthers (that and all the aches, pains, and the fact that what hasn't either stopped working or fallen out has turned wrinkled and grey) I'd probably carry in a chest-harness cross-draw like Galcos Alaskan system (which is of course precluded in most of the 'civilised' world unfortunately).
5.11 pants? They've become quite 'the costume' here too, but just like wearing DPM and MTP 'cammo' gear, the only people who 'ever' wear it/them are those who are the least likely to have ever have had any 'professional' experience of doing so. Due to my quite tall (but definitely Adonis like build – yes I do avoid mirrors, why do you ask?) I tend to 'make my own' (from ventile, usually L19 – because I'm 'still' a gear-geek) or the more plebian/work-a-day Fjallraven or Harkila offerings (but being honest even they are 'a fashion statement' to 'those in the know' – we're all just a bit tribal, making status statements to 'our' tribe. It's just our tribe is not the mainstream one).