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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cosmicforce who wrote (211757)	12/16/2012 11:27:18 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 541122

"Gangs used to use "zip guns" - converted from starting pistols and other legal sources of gun-like hardware." Back in the day, I heard "clothes pins", as did this questioner. >I'm no expert, but it seems to me that in the descriptions I have read >that rubber bands (many, many rubber bands wrapped together) and possibly >a clothespin were used in a zip-gun--the clothespin held the nail and the >rubberbands sent the nail into the bullet. I'll hve to go watch West >Side Story or something to be sure. Are there actual zip guns in >Timlin's Zip Gun Boogie or is it metphor? I haven't read that one yet. >Mark Very interesting that this zip gun discussion came up, because last weekend I was at the Southern Mystery Gathering and in a conversation regarding youth crime I asked. "When the last time you heard of a perp using a zip gun." People there didn't know what one was. The following comments are simply my own observations from having grown up in the crime capitol of the American South. The situation may have been different elsewhere. In my highly disturbed youth, I actually made and used zip guns. I've seen pictures of fairly ambitious ones using thick pipes but I think most of them like this were for people crazy enough to fire large caliber rounds in them. (Or else people who hadn't thought through the implications of having one blow up in their hand). The standard ones we built had a wood frame, a short copper pipe barrel, and a firing apparatus consisting of a six inch nail steel nail file with a whole punched through it, the rough edge of which was used as a firing pin. The rig was usually set up to fire a .22 long round (not long rifle). The thought was that the .22 long was less likely to cause the rig to blow up in your face. You'd pull the nail file back slowly to seat the round, and when you wanted to fire it, pull it back and let it slap against the rim fire cartridge. If that didn't fire you could hit the thing with a brick. Sometimes they worked. You wouldn't want to shoot through the same barrel many times. They were mostly used for purposes of bluff. A baseball bat was more dependable and probably had a longer range. On the other had, if a zip gun was pointed at someone, they could never tell if this was it's lucky day. Zip guns were a result of the lack of firearms available to the young and the restless. They fell out of favor once everyone could own a machine pistol. In the late fifties, they were mostly for the 11-12 year old set. Rounds for a .22 could be easily ripped off. There wasn't really much other purpose for them than early teen posturing.. The "Saturday night special" , a cheap but real .22 pistol, was available and not beyond the means of your basic 16 year old desparado. The SNS certainly killed a lot of people. The zip gun became a symbol for the JD culture like the switchblade, but my opinion is that the main reason for this was that they made a great newspaper picture. They looked frightening and the thought of a lively arm industry being run by the neighborhood babysitter was unsettling. A serious gangster was going to get a real handgun. As I've said, the zip gun industry could have been different elsewhere. The ZG did serve as a useful short hand symbol like the switchblade for writers exploring the juvenille delinquent universe. miskatonic.org