Lessons Learned and Applied

[waffen]

(Note to readers â?? I've also posted this on luger.gunboards.com, since I spent a lot of time there too.)



I never believed that a gun could be seductive.

Over the years I've accumulated a number of firearms, but I can't say I ever really searched for any of them. They came to me more or less on their own, sometimes because I'm the only one left in our family who still understands and appreciates well-made weapons and takes pride in owning and using them responsibly. Hunting and shooting skills are inseparable, and I am at heart a hunter. I've always viewed firearms as tools. Never "just tools"; I hate that phrase, because I think you can learn a lot about a man by carefully observing what tools he carries and how he treats them. I even have a rifle with a name; Terminus Est, a well-worn .30-06 that I've carried on many a hunt across the bluffs and valleys of Sauk County and has never missed a Wisconsin whitetail. But again, firearms are tools. Open my gun safe and one of the first things you'll notice is that there's no plastic in it; just lines of poetry written in black walnut and milled steel, with a bit of brass and hand-tooled leather here and there. And that says something about me.

However, my attitude started to change several months back when I happened to be watching the History Channel and saw "Tales of the Gun: The Luger". Like most people I could probably recognize a Luger since I was about six years old. I clearly remember at least one toy cap pistol that my folks told me was a Luger, and neither of them ever owned a gun. But I never really thought about why Lugers are so recognizable, or sought after by collectors, or why they occupy such an important place in the history of firearms development. "Tales of the Gun" answered these questions and also interviewed notable people in the Luger-collecting community like Fred Datig, Charles Kenyon Jr., and Ralph Shattuck. Controversial or not, these gentlemen are great story-tellers. By the end of the program I was hooked.

I thought hard about what kind of Luger I wanted and decided on a WWII piece. Grand-dad and my great uncles all served in the War, some in the European Theater and others in the Pacific. The survivors brought back some souvenirs that I still have; a couple of Mauser K98 ammo pouches dated 1939 and 1940 â?¦ a nice K98 bayonet, frog, and sheath (nonmatching, unfortunately) â?¦ a "universal" German cleaning kit dated 1937 and stamped "G. Appel" with a stick eagle-over-Na167, and a few other odds and ends. Grand-dad apparently had some time on his hands out there in the PTO, because he fashioned a beautiful model of a P-38 Lightning fighter plane entirely out of .50 caliber machine gun shell cases and bullets (Grand-dad was a machinist by trade). But the ETO veterans in our family often wished they'd brought back a Luger somehow.