Category: All About Guns
This is Mack — a truly great American.
I have a friend named Mack. Mack is the salt of the earth. He and his kind are what made America what it is. In addition to a lot of other positive attributes, Mack also has a superhuman work ethic.
Mack has a crew. They can do literally anything. They spend their weeks replacing roofs, building sheds and resurrecting derelict kitchens. They built me a new bathroom. Mack’s crew includes his son Corey and his friends Justin and Dave. They are all comparably awesome. Within the first half hour of their working on my bathroom, one of them had asked where I stood with Jesus. They’re the kind of guys who would gladly give you their shoes or shirt if they felt you needed them.
Justin is covered in tattoos and talks like a drill sergeant. That’s because he spent a career in the Army as a grunt and a drill sergeant before he settled down with Mack to build stuff. Justin did five combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On the weekends, when most normal people are kicking back and relaxing, Mack runs his own restaurant called Harmon’s in Paris, Mississippi. Harmon’s offers superlative Southern home cooking. I can tell you from personal experience that their fried shrimp and catfish are to die for.
Here we see Mack and Justin preparing breakfast
for 40 or so hungry veterans in rural Mississippi.
Harmon’s Restaurant dishes up great Southern food served with love.
If You Serve It, They Will Come…
The first Saturday of every month, Mack opens his restaurant up for a free breakfast for military veterans. Justin helps with the cooking. Donations are accepted but are neither sought nor expected. The food is basic Southern fare — scrambled eggs, grits, biscuits, hash browns, bacon, and the fixings. Anyone who has ever eaten in a military mess hall will recognize it. None of it is terribly good for you, but it is both delicious and filling. Mack feeds 40 or so grizzled old vets on Saturday morning out of his own pocket just because he is a great American.
Once word got out, the place filled up. It is amazing the extraordinary guys who just came out of the woodwork in small town Mississippi. One guy flew F-111 Aardvarks in the Air Force. Another spent a career underwater in submarines. A smattering served time in the Mississippi National Guard. All of the old WWII guys have passed, but Vietnam is ably represented. One gentleman was a Green Beret officer who did three combat tours in Vietnam. Another was a Special Forces doctor who treated both friend and foe alike during his time in Southeast Asia.
As you might imagine, there is no shortage of entertaining stories to be found in that place. I bring along a handful of machine guns each month for everybody to paw over, and we kill an hour swapping lies. Many of the guys in attendance used those weapons for real. Each meal starts with prayer, and wives get dragged along every few months just to keep the place civilized.
I typically toss a few machineguns in the truck
to give the guys something to paw over while we talk.
Packaging is Everything
If you partake in the mainstream media, all you are fed is doom and gloom. Americans hate Americans. The economy is in a freefall. Neighborhoods burn, and we rob each other blind. It’s all we ever see. One might be forgiven for believing that our Great Republic is on its last legs. Should you feel that way, I would assert that perhaps you’re getting your news from the wrong sources.
Down here in rural Mississippi, we’re doing just fine, thank you very much. In my neck of the woods, everybody is armed, yet nobody seems to get shot. Folks really don’t care what color you are anymore. We still go to church, and we raise our kids to respect authority and love their country.
Far be it from me to seem all judgey, but the folks running California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois are all idiots. Urban spaces have become a hell of their own making. Tolerating lawlessness, disrespecting law enforcement, and paying people for bad behavior is a great way to let the inmates run the asylum. How is that working out these days?
By contrast, our streets are clean, our cost of living is low, and our people are friendly. The biggest problem we have in my little Southern town is that a lot of folks are moving here. But that’s okay. We’ll keep building houses and restaurants. We may even eventually land a Target to go along with Kroger and Wal-Mart. Down here where I live, America is still quite awesome.
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JP Sauer & Sohn Double Barrel 12ga
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The Redlegs at work
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S&W Model 66-8 Combat Magnum
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WINCHESTER 72A .22 BOLT ACTION
Brit standbys: The Boys Rifle dwarfs a No. 4 Enfield.
Nobody really needs an anti-tank rifle. When I informed my long-suffering bride of the newest acquisition she just rolled her pretty eyes, shook her head, and wandered off to do something productive. You don’t buy an anti-tank rifle because you need it. You buy an anti-tank rifle because it’s just so freaking cool.
The rear sight is easily adjustable between 300 and 500 yards.
Descent Into Madness
It all began with an email from a dear friend. You know the type. The only thing better than spending your own money on something old, black and oily is spending your buddy’s money on something old, black and oily. He already had a Boys Rifle, so when he tripped over another he naturally thought of me. He dangled the thing in front of me like some kind of worm, and I gobbled it straight up without a fuss.
An anti-tank rifle is a Destructive Device. Never mind that it weighs as much as a Buick and shoots a ridiculously expensive antique round that has been out of production for more than half a century. In the eyes of the government it is Extra Special Dangerous (not a real federal classification so far), so it requires the same $200 transfer tax and interminable wait as might a machinegun or grenade launcher. At the terminus of all this hassle, however, this monster gun makes quite the fashion statement.
The forward-swept pistol grip on the Boys is perhaps its most distinctive feature.
Settle behind the gun and you’ll see the wisdom of this geometry.
Back Story
The .55 caliber rifle was born in 1937 of one Capt. Henry C. Boys. Boys was the Assistant Superintendent of Design at the Royal Small Arms Factory in Enfield, England. The gun was originally supposed to be called the “Stanchion,” but Boys died a few days before the weapon was approved for service, so they named it after him.
The Boys Rifle was actually obsolete when it was introduced. Against early light tanks and tankettes (a real thing used fairly extensively by the Italians, French and Japanese) the weapon was relatively effective. In fairly short order, however, armored vehicle technology had rendered the rifle’s 47.6-gram bullet little more than an inconvenience.
Optimized rounds sported a tungsten core and travelled at around 2,800 fps. These hardened projectiles would penetrate just under 1″ of steel armor plate at 100 yards.
The Boys Rifle was liberally supplied to the Finns during their Winter War with the Soviets in 1939. The weapon was popular with Finnish troops as it could reliably deal with the T26 light tanks the Russians fielded at the time. It was also used extensively in North Africa. After the Battle of France, however, the Boys had developed a reputation for ineffectiveness that was getting tough to shake.
Desperate to restore confidence in the gun, the Canadian government contracted with Walt Disney in 1942 to create a short animated film titled Stop That Tank! It can be seen on YouTube and is pure unfiltered awesome. Hitler ultimately has his personal tank destroyed by a Boys Rifle and ends up in Hades alongside his pal, Satan.
The USMC purchased Boys Rifles from Canada prior to the Pearl Harbor attack and used them to destroy a pair of Japanese seaplanes off Makin Island. The widespread employment of the Browning M2 .50 HMG — which had comparable penetration — rendered the Boys superfluous.
The Boys Rifle was ultimately replaced by the PIAT (Projector, Infantry, Anti-Tank) in British service. The PIAT was a man-portable spigot mortar firing a shaped charge warhead that was hugely more effective against tanks.
The Boys Rifle was used sporadically throughout the war and saw limited use in a variety of brushfire conflicts around the Pacific afterwards. The last known combat use of the Boys occurred in September 1965 when members of the Irish Republican Army used a Boys Rifle to fire on the British fast-attack patrol boat HMS Brave Borderer, damaging one of its turbine engines. Nowadays Boys Rifles are only of interest to gun geeks like me.
The massive belted .55-caliber rounds could put paid to early light tanks. However,
armored vehicle technology soon eclipsed the Boys Rifle’s capabilities.
The Boys Rifle came in three major variations. The first sported this interesting circular muzzle brake.
Details, Details
The Boys Rifle weighs 35 lbs. (empty) and is just over 5 ft. long. It sports a conventional bolt action set into a spring-retarded sliding chassis that helps absorb the gun’s prodigious recoil. There were three variations built around the same basic action and my gun is the earliest sort.
The gun feeds from a top-mounted single-stack 5-round box magazine and sports iron sights that are flip-adjustable between 200 and 300 yards.
The odd forward cant of the two pistol grips accommodates the human form nicely, though there is no conceivable way to carry the Boys comfortably. Production culminated at 62,000 copies in 1940, and many available today have been rechambered to .50 BMG.
Heavy, inefficient, obsolete and cool, my Boys Rifle is now the epicenter of my gunroom.
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Some Colt gold cup porn anyone?
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