Rifle, Battle, the extreme customization of.

The other evening I was sitting on the porch of Landlady's Meadow House with Landlady and M, where we were discussing pink rifles.

Stop laughing.

My personal take on the phenomenon of pink rifles is that I don't find pink AR-15s at all jarring. In fact they've pretty much been elevated to the level of commodity by now. You've got your Barbie ARs:

And your Hello Kitty ARs:

...and I don't find them the least bit odd.  ARs have always been kinda toy-like.  Hell, the first nickname they picked up, back in the sixties, was "Mattel Toy."

AKs, on the other hand, are almost deliberately ugly, in a fearsome kinda way.  It suits their intended clientele...

...who, whatever his other virtues, is almost guaranteed not to be a nice man.  Conventionally speaking.  Is rifle.  Is not supposed to be safe.  And whatever your experiences with this guy, "safe" is probably not going to be an option.

Oh, sure - sometimes a banana-republic potentate will get a misguided idea for customizing an AK...

...but that's just bad taste, expected in anybody named Uday.  It's still ugly, and nothing like cute.  AKs don't do cute.

Which is why the phenomenon of the pink AK has always seemed delightfully incongruous to me.

Let's face it, one of these things is not like the other.

But still, to each his own.  If there were no possibility of a pink AK, there could be no Kalashnikitty.

And would the world not be an immeasurably poorer place in which to live?

And yet...surely these things can be taken too far for anyone's taste.  For example - and the thing which got all this simmering in my diseased brain - I give you this:

No, your eyes aren't deceiving you.  That's a gold-plated or painted SKS with an aftermarket magazine and some sort of tartan fabric stock covering.  And it...is...just...wrong.

That's all I was trying to say.