J. M. Davis Museum

Back from vacation. I dragged the family (well, my Mom and daughter, the GeekWife, son & Dad came willingly) to this place while on vacation. Man, oh, man was it terrific. Anyone that can get to Okiehoma that has even a passing interest in the history of firearms, or just gets off on guns, should go and visit. We were there for hours and didn't see anything like all of the 20,000 firearms on display. I skipped the shotgun section entirely and on the way out noticed about 4-6 racks of handguns that I missed. The collection is pretty heavily weighted to American and civilian arms, but there's enough there of everything to satisfy almost anyone. I especially enjoyed all the under-hammer guns manufactured in where we live, the fantastically preserved gatling gun, the case full of matched dueling pistols, the racks of "History of the American Military" firearms. There was a cool collection of criminal paraphenalia, World War 1 posters and swords. They also had a huge collection beer steins and saddles that I glanced at.

First complaint, you can't shoot any of the guns and looking at all the stuff in there, my fingers were twitching more than once towards the glass (if I run really, really fast with this B.A.R. ... hmmm, nah). Second, while some of the organization made sense, a lot of it seemed sort of willy-nilly. Sometimes things were organized by caliber, sometimes by time period, sometimes by manufacturer, but with no hard-core rhyme or reason that I could discern (other than, these are rifles, these are hand-guns, these are shotguns). Lastly, some of the descriptions I noted on firearms that I'm fairly well acquainted with (Makarov, Mannlicher-Carcano, others) were wrong. They had a full length 1891 Carcano that they, incorrectly, identified as the same kind of gun used to kill Kennedy, one display case away from a 1938 Carcano carbine, which actually was. One of the Makarov's was labelled something like "firearm, possibly of Russian origin" when it was pretty clearly a Makarov and from the markings, you can place the origin to Bulgaria, East Germany, Russia or China pretty damned accurately.

But those are really nits. It was a great time except that the GeekWife couldn't find a Baker rifle.