Ian's getting weirder by the minute (I'm so proud)

My friend Ian likes guns.

Okay - you like guns. I like guns. All God's chilluns like guns. You don't understand - Ian REALLY likes guns. Ian's father is a veritable published scholar of certain types of military small arms, and Ian has embraced that interest. To a degree that teaches you, after a certain level of familiarity has been achieved, that - whatever you may have believed about yourself prior to meeting him - you're not a gun nut. That's a gun nut.

Ian has a website that lets him indulge and express his interests. I've plugged Forgotten Weapons before, and recommend it to anyone interested in such things. But in putting together The Independent Spirit there were certain rules he, Debra and I agreed to: I couldn't indulge my inner anarchist lunatic, and nobody started ranting about guns. So far that pact hasn't been officially violated since nobody's actually, you know, ranting.

(Let's be fair - Ian doesn't rant. He'll talk your ear off about the intricacies of the feeder mechanism on the 1931 Andalusian PFVC-31 light machinegun and how it compares with the similar but not identical Scandahoovian RXP-29, but he doesn't rant. That's my job.)

Buuut...the subject has come up. See, Ian has one single ambition he has not yet achieved. He's never owned a machine gun. Now contrary to popular misconception, machine gun ownership is not actually illegal under federal law. They never outlawed it, they just made it really expensive and hard. So expensive and so hard that only a rich person or a madman would indulge in it. Ian's not...rich.

Another thing Ian's into is Jack Spirko's Survival Podcast. As a lark, Ian - who is already deep in the legal process of legally acquiring his very own legal machine legal gun (I'm just going to keep repeating the L-word here) - called in to the show to ask Spirko's opinion of machine guns as an investment commodity. Spirko replied to the question on the show, and Saturday night we all sat in Landlady's Meadow House and crowed as we listened. The answer was - once Spirko got over the sheer weird badass lunacy of the question - quite clearly reasoned and balanced. I was impressed.

Which is my long-winded way of telling you the link to that part of the show is here. Go listen - it's fun.