MAGHAFFAR'S BLOG

MAGhaffar

WHOO-HOO! ...I found a REAL Mal's gun (kinda)
Saturday, April 29, 2006

Or as real as I'm probably gonna find within 15 miles of my home. So I'm at the Upland, CALIF. Lemon Festival at our Mosque's book stall and something tells me a gotta saunter on down the street and take a looksee around. I go on a Walkabout and stop in front of a shop window that has long coats & western wear / native american stuff. That brings me into the shop. Still lookin' for a browncoat...

So there's nothing really Browncoaty in there, so I start looking around elsewhere and see all these old west reproductions of guns -- Winchester's, Henry's (rifles), plus Old West handguns. So I ask the shopkeeper if he's got any 1858 Army or Navy Cap & Ball pistols -- this is the basic design that got turned into Mal's "Hero" sidearm with the octoagonal barrel. So the shopkeeper says, "no 1858s per se -- but he does have a reproduction of an 1851 Navy version. The gun frame is brass and the cylinder and barrel are black, plus the stock is standard, not elongated like Mal's. But the good news is it's a real working pistol, not a toy! For sales purposes, he can't have fully working firearms in his shop cuz he doesn't have a fire-arms dealer's license. But all the gun is missing are the "nipples", which act sorta like firing pins to actually cause the hammer energy to get transferred to the cylinder chamber and ignite the black powder primer.

Long story made short, I am 3 days away from having in my hot little hands a potentially (in the future) fully working Mal's gun -- sans the prop add-ons and other stuff on the actual 1858 used for Mal's gun. Plus the guy has holsters, so gotta see about getting the whole holster and belt setup to go with it.

Also at this place, were several other 1851s -- one a Confederate style with all silver metal-work with the high-raised thumb hammer and another all black, also with the high-rasied hammer. But these last two are not working guns and can't be modified to actually fire. But for a prop to go with a Mal costume (especially the all-black one) these 1851s would have the weight and feel of a real gun, instead of the Resin prop things.

It gets better people... So without me even asking him if he's got any dusters of a 'brownish" color, he volunteeres that he's getting in some "Tombstone" style long coats and dusters that a place in Arizona makes -- they made them for the actual movie. Of course, I ask if they'll come in brown, and he says, no all in black. So I then start enlightening him about Firefly and the manic obsession that Browncoats have obtaining their own real-life Browncoats, and how if he could get a sizable quanity of under $300 browncoat dusters, he'd have the possibility of selling them potentially thousands of us Browncoats.

I recently picked up the Serenity graphic novel and showed him the browncoat Mal wears, along with his gun, explaining the as many reasonable facsimiles of these two items as he could procure, I could find buyers for.

The shopkeeper is a big Western fan -- has watched "Tombstone" and "Open Range" the way we all watch the BDS and BDM -- so I explained how Firefly was an outer space western, with six-shooters, horses and that great Civil War-era music & chivalry thing going on.

So he asks me what's up with show? Why'd it get cancelled, etc. Told him it was too good & well-written for all them Neilson viewers (all 5,000) who decide what's a hit and what's not. Plus how the network execs were brain-dead pencil-pushers with the heads up their pi-gu's.

Anyway, I'm enthusing away about the show and then you should've seen his eyes get huge when I told him that this 3-month-run cancelled Fox TV show from 2002 has sold 500,000 DVD boxsets of the series since it came out -- and that it spawned a movie in Sept. 2005... and that translated into a whole passel of folks with cashy money just waiting for their own real Browncoats and 1858's of their own and how he could make some serious ka-CHING out of it... Plus he's aBrowncoat waitin' to happen, I can tell. In the store window of his shop is that famous poster of Geronimo or crazy horse -- not sure who all, but a grip of Indians with their rifles and guns and the slogan: HOMELAND SECURITY -- FIGHTING TERRORISM SINCE 1492. 'Nuff Sed...

WHOOOO-HOOOOOO!!!!


So keep your fingers and toes crossed, my fellow BCers -- I'm hoping this guy checks out the series or the movie and starts working on getting in some reasonably priced Browncoats and other stuff. Will post some pics of my 1851 when I get it so y'all can drool....

COMMENTS

Sunday, April 30, 2006 6:00 PM

MAGHAFFAR


<<< nosadseven WROTE ON Sunday, April 30, 2006 - 17:18...

Sweet. I like the guy's poster, too.

So do they even let you have a hand gun, working or not, in CA? Or is it just in the cities that that's an issue?>>>

Well, gun ownership isn't a problem in my area as far as I know -- handguns, etc., and because the 1851 / 1858 guns are cap & ball, there's some kind of registration exception. Will find out more when I get it & take it in to a gun shop to see about the missing parts I need & what the black powder and ball setup goes for.

Anyway, today I go in to the guy's shop (last day of the Lemon Festival) so a friend can use his high-quality camera phone to get some pics of the gun and me with it, so once he emails 'em to me, I'll post them here. Also, looked more closely at the other 1851s he had, and the other models don't have the octogonal barrel. Not sure why. Will have to look up the pics of the various of the 1858 on Google again -- typed in "Mal's gun" and it came right up.

Sunday, April 30, 2006 5:18 PM

NOSADSEVEN


Sweet. I like the guy's poster, too.

So do they even let you have a hand gun, working or not, in CA? Or is it just in the cities that that's an issue?


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