Christmas is a time to celebrate what we have…and also to be thankful for what we once had, including friends and loved ones who have passed.

This last September, we lost Chuck Karwan. He was a tireless fighter for gun owners’ civil rights, and one of the world’s leading small arms authorities, with genuine expertise that encompassed everything from knives to machine guns.

His career as an Army officer proceeded almost directly from West Point to Vietnam, where he saw much up close and personal combat and earned the Bronze Star. Chuck saw a lot of men killed by gunfire, some of them through his own gunsights, and forever after was a voice of reality in controversial discussions on such matters where some based their opinions more on theories born in laboratories than in truths observed in battle.

Chuck was the author of the second and third editions of The Gun Digest Book of Combat Handgunnery, out of print now but well worth searching for second-hand on e-bay or Amazon or at your local used book store. His essay on “stopping power” in the third edition was worth the price of the book by itself.

Fortunately, Chuck was not only an excellent writer but a prolific one. A search at www.findarticles.com should turn up rich, informative troves of his work. He has left a great legacy there for all of us, and for those who follow.

Chuck Karwan had been suffering cardiac problems for some time before the massive heart attack that took him on September 8, 2008. As a result, he was unable to obtain a satisfactory amount of insurance for those he left behind. Chuck was first and foremost a family man, and wouldn’t have wanted it that way. Donations can be made to Chuck Karwan Memorial Fund, Umpqua Bank, 100 W. Central, Sutherlin, OR 97482. A memorial website may be found at www.chuckkarwan.com.

In a world of posers and phonies, Chuck Karwan was the real deal: a gentle family man who loved children, yet a fierce warrior, and a masterful leader and trainer of warriors. We were fortunate to have had him among us to learn from. At Christmas, such role model Americans are among the blessings we should be giving thanks for.

Why do Latvians oil their gardens?

So their buried AK47s won’t rust before the Russians attack them again.

The joke comes to us from gun-savvy, politically wise Peter Buxtun. Oppressed nations have a long history of their citizens burying their guns. Some in the US worry that the time might be coming for them to do the same.

The January/February 2009 issue of Backwoods Home magazine has a fascinating article by Charles Wood about how he did just that. He sealed a Ruger Mini-14, suitably greased and accompanied by a quantity of ammunition and useful accessories, in PVC pipe and dug it up fifteen years later. The experiment ended with a functional semiautomatic .223 autoloading rifle in fine condition.

Mr. Wood notes, however: “…it took me several days with a shovel and a rake to locate the rifle.” Burying a gun is like burying treasure. If you have a map, you have to worry about someone else getting their hands on said map, because whoever has the map has the treasure…or in this case, the treasured gun. If I was going to your house looking for genuine criminal contraband, I’d ask the judge to sign a warrant that included GPS devices and computer hard drives so we could check places where said contraband might be hidden. If you bury stuff, you need a good memory and stable landmarks, not to mention the ability to cover the “burial site” unrecognizably, and the absolute certainty that no one watched you bury it and you never mentioned it to a soul.

They’re selling “survival guns” now with the PVC pipe to bury them included. Mossberg’s JIC (“Just In Case”?) package includes a stockless 12-gauge pump shotgun and the pipe in which to inter it. I can picture myself standing next to a customer buying one, and feeling my evil sense of humor rise, and hearing myself say loudly, “Hey, does anybody know where they sell metal detectors around here?”

If folks do come with black helicopters to take our guns, they’ll doubtless have metal-finding technology that will reach deep. I’m told that burying them vertical helps reduce their profile to metal detectors, as of course does greater depth. However, metal detection technology ain’t my side of the house, and I’ll defer to those with genuine expertise if they’d care to post comments here.

The old saying is that redress is found in four boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, the soapbox, and finally the bullet box. The ballot box has failed us this time around, but we have another crack at it coming up in a couple of years. The “jury box” has been pretty good to us, since the highest court in the land resoundingly confirmed the individual right to bear arms in SCOTUS’ Heller decision this past June. I’m on the soapbox right now, and so are a lot of us. The bullet box is a LONG way off.

And I don’t think we need to bury it yet.

At the same time, it wouldn’t hurt to keep your Jan/Feb ’09 issue of Backwoods Home handy, where you can review Charles Wood’s good advice if in case it turns out that I have been overly optimistic.

How many of us got our first gun for Christmas? Or our most memorable one? Share the memories here!

The Christmas gun that sticks most in my mind was under the tree for me in the year 1960. It was a Colt .45 Automatic. These days, we’re semantically incorrect if we don’t call it a semiautomatic, but hell, Colt called it an Automatic Pistol, and it was the term of the day, and who was a twelve-year-old kid to argue?

Early in December of that year, Dad and gun dealer Stan Sprague took me out back behind Stan’s great old gun shop to have me try the pistol. I braced myself. The gun was at arm’s length in my right hand (you fired handguns one-handed then), and I’d heard and read that a .45’s “kick” could “tear the arm out of the socket.” I squeezed off one shot. I kept the muzzle downrange and turned only my head and said, “I like it, Dad…”

That set the pistol, a military surplus gun bought for $37.50 in 1960 dollars, on its way under the Christmas tree a few weeks later. Lesson 1: If at all possible, make certain that the gift gun is right for the giftee! Today, almost half a century later and a firearms instructor most of my adult life, I wish I had a buck for every kid/lady/police recruit I’ve met who was given a gun that didn’t fit them for size, recoil, or actual need. With all those dollars, my Christmas gift budget for this year would be taken care of.

The pistol, a 1911 model produced in the waning months of WWI, was not alone under the tree. Dad bought me the gun, but Mom bought me a nice new military surplus tanker’s chest holster for it at the Army/Navy Store downtown. My sister ordered me some books about it, including the Army manual, and by Christmas night I was practicing tearing it down and reassembling it. I soon got to where I could field strip the pistol and reassemble it, with eyes closed, in about a minute. My Uncle Whitney bought me a ten-dollar box of new commercial Winchester 230 grain .45 ammo for it…a sinful luxury, since back then we bought GI surplus ammo for half that price in beige boxes at the gun shop or that Army/Navy Store. (And they sold it to kids who had permission notes from parents the dealers knew.) Lesson 2: Guns are big-ticket items. Let other givers chip in. Think ammo. Think cleaning kits. Think gun cases, slings, and holsters, and gift certificates for firearms safety/shooting classes.

Lest you think it was an inappropriate gift for a kid in puberty, let me explain that I had been shooting long guns since age four and pistols since age nine. I had learned the importance of living up to the responsibility I’d been given. Reading gun magazines more than comic books, I had watched the renaissance of the “obsolete” Colt .45 auto accomplished almost single-handedly in the articles of Jeff Cooper in Guns & Ammo, and had wanted one so badly I’d told my dad that a Colt .45 Automatic was the only thing I wanted for Christmas. Within a year, I was carrying it loaded in the family jewelry store, because my dad and his dad had both been in shootings, which, as armed citizens, they’d survived. Lesson 3: A firearm is a gift that says, “I consider you responsible, and I trust you.” Give that gift only when you can say that honestly. Later, when I gave my own kids guns at Christmas and at other times, I was sending the same message. In each generation, the message was received…

I still own that ancient Colt .45 Automatic. I carried it in a jewelry store as a kid in the 1960s, and as a young police patrolman in the 1970s. It helped to set me on a career path that has helped some other good people to stay whole in more ways than one. Transferring a lethal weapon between private parties is not as easy as it once was, and I refer you to the ProArms Podcast Number 16, from http://proarms.podbean.com, where you want to listen in particular to veteran firearms dealer Herman Gunter’s advice on how to give a gun to a responsible person you care about in a totally legal way that avoids any accusation of “straw man purchase.” And, when in doubt, we all remind you that a gift certificate from the gun shop is the easiest way to handle such a gift between adults, especially when giver and recipient live in different legal jurisdictions.

I wish you all the best of Holiday seasons.

Gift certificates make “gun gifts” much easier.

North American Arms is one company that can make giftee’s name or initials into the serial number (must usually be alpha-numeric), but considerable advanced order time is usually involved.

A jewelry store can engrave names on revolver’s sideplate or auto pistol’s slide. By leaving those parts, no one at the shop is alarmed and no illegal transfer of firearms possession has taken place. Lettering can be much fancier than this, for gift items; this is author’s service revolver from 30 years ago, S&W Model 66 .357 that shows much use, and name was engraved simply for ID purposes.