A non-owner's taste in gun porn

weapons.

I haven't been there for awhile, though, and last night saw me glutting through its archives. Six or seven pages back, I stumbled across this:

I also have a real interest in guns with interesting histories. Guns with a long series of modifications, or pieces that were used by 2 or 3 or 4 or more different countries before finally finding their way to the US....

I could go on – K98k Mausers and MG42s taken from Nazi stockpiles and used by the fledgling Israeli state, Gewehr 88s used in WWI by Germany and then given to Turkey, updated to use spitzer ammo, and then reworked to look like Mausers... Vetterli rifles updated every time a European war looked imminent... They may not appeal to a lot of people, but to me those are the really interesting pieces. “If this rifle could talk…I’d need to learn three new languages to understand its story.”

What do you think? What do you find appealing in a prospective gun purchase?

And so, having neglected blogging for a few days, I thought I'd write about it here.

Part of what drives me to write here is that my interest in guns is purely abstract. I have no interest in a serious relationship with them; I don't want to design them, don't want to build them, hope (and yet simultaneously fear) that I may never fire one in anger. I don't own any, because doing that would probably get me killed the next time a cop pulls me over. I don't shop for them and don't plan to start.

I love gun porn as a writer. For the last two years, specifically as the writer of an alternate history whose tech is starting to develop very differently from how it developed IRL. Andalusada's canonical present day is 1930, when the overwhelming majority of the Forgotten Weapons vault was either state of the art or hadn't even been invented yet. And ever since Asabiyya 2000 (which I should write about someday; I don't think I've even mentioned it until now), I've stopped thinking of my worlds as words, and started to think of them in different senses and media. Especially visual media.

Being a demiurge is very different when you act as if there'd be an audience, especially one as passive as (say) a film or TV audience. Spectators don't have the time or power to read the fucking FAQ. Spectators have not done the research. All the trivia that the gun otaku in me loves, all the research that I love to do (and try to show) - none of it matters.

I don't want to waste time having to say the exact details of things. In a visual medium, you can show them. Star Wars: A New Hope did that by dressing up real guns, and I think they did it very well: instantly recognizable, noticeably different, and yet they look like guns, not TV remotes.

Andalusada, of course, isn't Star Wars in that it has a further constraint: they're not using energy weapons yet. So on top of those three parameters (a strong visual image, alterity, and plausibility) I have a fourth: not being blatantly stupid.

Those three things are what titillate me in gun porn: recognizability, alterity, and plausibility.