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.

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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.

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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.

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The Jacksonville (FL) Times-Union newspaper got itself splashed all over the Internet recently with a front-page story about panic-buying of guns after the election. The story itself was old news: the heavy buying had started before the election, ramped up to epic proportions as soon as the results were in, and continues unabated as I write this. Publishing the story on 11/23/08, the Jacksonville paper was behind its usual fast track in gathering news that is actually new. What caught the nation’s attention was one individual quoted in newsman Charlie Patton’s story:

“In a comment bound to infuriate some gun owners, Mikhail Muhammad, state and Jacksonville chairman of the New Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, said the increasing gun sales were a reaction by ‘the radical element in the white community.’ ‘We call it white supremacy anxiety disorder,’ Muhammad said.”

It may have infuriated “some gun owners,” but it caused this one to laugh.

I’m of Syrian descent on my paternal side, and Scotch-Irish on the maternal. “A mutt,” as Barack Obama recently called himself, like so many of us. When my eldest was ten, I took her with me on safari in South Africa, in the time of apartheid. It gave her a new appreciation of American freedom, a new understanding of her mom and dad telling her what it was like to grow up when there was segregation in parts of our own country. And an understanding of what it was like to be the ones discriminated against, because under the three-tiered system of White/Colored/Black that was apartheid, the kid and I were “Colored.”

One thing all of us can be thankful about as we review the results of November 4 is that this country finally elected an African-American as its President, and did so thanks to a huge percentage of the Caucasian vote. It will go far – though how far, we don’t know yet – to exorcise the demons of racism that have haunted our nation’s history for so long.

Hell, it’s no secret to anyone who reads Backwoods Home magazine or this blog that the candidate I really wanted was African-American. Unfortunately, Condoleeza Rice was apparently too fed up with thankless jobs to run for the one that would have put her in the Oval Office.

I’m feeling an urge to phone the Black Panther HQ in Jacksonville and talk to Mikhail Muhammad. If it’s about “white supremacy anxiety disorder,” I’d like to hear his take on why so many African-Americans are buying “assault rifles” and “high capacity” magazines right now. I’d like to ask him why the website www.newblackpantherjax.com says in its “10-Point Platform,” “ARMS IN THE HANDS OF THE PEOPLE!” (Point 2) and “The Second Amendment of white America’s Constitution gives a right to bear arms” (Point 7). Hell, I might even ask him if he knew that Martin Luther King was a gun owner. He was also a Republican.

Let’s consider the principle of Occam’s Razor. Often, the simplest explanation is the correct explanation.

Ya think it just might be that all Americans of every color are desperately buying certain guns because a President has been elected, and a Party given great power, who made it clear that they don’t want those American citizens to have access to those guns anymore?

The front page story in question.

Racial elements in the last Presidential race were more layered than they looked.

Black and white alike have been buying guns in the current “run.” Scene is Trail Boss Gun Shop in Sierra Vista, AZ.

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