Snowflakes in Hell

Some of you might remember the YouTube videos featuring miniature machine guns that actually fire.  At first I thought it was a fake, but then I found out that there was actually a Class II manufacturer that was making these.    That would be Lakeside Machine, who had a booth at the convention.

The rotating table of mini machine gun goodness.  The cool thing is, these are all semi-auto, so are for sale on the civilian market.  These are very beautifully crafted, and they actually fire!

This picture wasn’t meant for me to be aiming straight at the camera, but it ended up that way, because by the time Bitter got to snap the pic, the table had rotated.  Like I said, everything on the floor has to be rendered inoperable to be put on display.

30 Caliber Browning machine gun.  My hand is showing for scale.  You’ll notice the belt of fake .22LR along the bottom.

I really like these products.  I’d love to buy one to put on display, but I’d have to figure out a way to secure it nicely.

I decided to check out the FN booth.   FN is making some pretty cool stuff these days.   First I checked out the FS2000.

It’s very interesting, and certainly slick looking.  But when it comes to rifles, I’m pretty utilitarian.  For one, I’m not a huge fan of bullpups, even though this one ejects the brass out the front, which is pretty cool.   My main problem with it is that I have to flip up that black cover on the top rear of the rifle in order to check the chamber.   I much prefer to have easy visual access to the rifle’s chamber.  I’m also not a huge fan of the magazine release.  On the AR system, you can fetch yourself a magazine while you’re firing your last few shots, then drop the mag with a single finger, let gravity do the work of getting it out of the receiver, then just slam in another one.   On the FS2000, you can see a black button forward to the mag well on the receiver.  You hit this with the same hand you’re removing the magazine with, but you still have to yank it.  I prefer to let gravity do that work.

That’s me trying it out.   Don’t give me crap about fingers and triggers, I was actually trying out the trigger pull.  All firearms on the floor have had the firing pins removed.  I also checked the chamber before trying a dry fire.  The FN guy had to show me where the chamber was.

All in all, the collector in me loves this rifle, just for it’s uniqueness, but I’m not sure what it offers over other operating systems out there.

The Banquet is over.   I’ve gotten to meet several more gun bloggers today.   Michael Bane, and Yosemite Sam and Denise of The Ten Ring.  The weather is cold here in St. Louis, but we listened to some of Dave Hardy’s stories out in front of the Renaissance.   Once Dave decided to retire for the night, we went back inside and sat down with Dave Kopel and Stephen Halbrook.

It’s very cool for me to finally meet in person, people who’s papers, articles and academic research, I’ve read or seen cited for years.  I think it’s a great thing about blogging that it makes possible this kind of dialog.  But one thing is, you’ll never get to know half as many people as you’d like through blogging, and you’ll never get to know that half, half as well as you would like.  I still have more NRA convention blogging to come, including my impressions of Ambassador John Bolton’s keynote at the members meeting, plus a few pictures from the floor.

Stay tuned.