Nazi-Era Guns

Canadian Parliament

Apparently a Canadian MP running for Prime Minister decided to do a photo op shooting a pistol, causing the Canadian outlet “The Hill Times” to opine that said MP, who was shooting a 1972 Walther P1, was firing a “nazi-era handgun.” Twitter, of course, immediately started having fun with the accusation. My comments:

  • Congratulations to Canadian gun owners: you’ve made it. You’ve become a constituency the politically ambitious feel they should pander to. Note this is different from getting them to actually do something for you (that will, sadly, always be pulling teeth), but if you keep at it you might have some victories ahead of you.
  • I’m always reluctant to comment on firearms in foreign markets. For different reasons, different firearms are more common or less common in other countries. So if you go by what you’d expect here, you might be wrong. I often wonder how often “experts” really means “friends I know who like guns.” Apparently there are a lot of P1s in Canada, which is a postwar variant of the P38. So not even a “nazi-era handgun,” anymore than a Volkswagon Beetle is a “nazi-era car” (a point made quite humorously on the Twitter thread).

It was a cheap shot by The Hill Times, and I’m glad to see if backfire. The story showing now has obviously been edited to not quite be so comically bad. I actually have a Mauser 98K manufactured by Sauer and John in 1938 (Russian capture, and in not great shape, so no big collector’s item). Am I now a nazi-sympathizer, as The Hill Times was obviously trying to imply here?

6 thoughts on “Nazi-Era Guns”

  1. Well, at least it wasn’t a Luger – which, depending on the barrel length, can be a prohibited firearm in Canada, requiring a special license. (105mm/4.1 inches is the magic number.)

  2. Hey, I live Canada, have a Canadian firearms licence, oops, license, and have a comment.
    The original “Hill Times” header revealed four key elements:
    The Conservative candidate’s name: Kellie Leitch
    The word “Conservative”.
    The word “Nazi”.
    The word “Gun”. (OMG!)
    You see, just as in The U.S., most of the media is an arm of the liberals. They had an opportunity to reinforce a concept into brain-dead readers.
    Earlier, Ms Leitch exploded liberal heads when she stated that pepper spray should be legalized for female self-defense. Well, I guess it’s better than the “nothing” they have now.

  3. Since your Mauser is a Russian capture, you are obviously complicit in the recent hacking of the presidential election.

    1. If you so much as say Hello to a Russian, especially if you say it in Russian ,then you are a spy who helped steal the election for Trump.

  4. I’ll give it more credit than that.

    The only change I can see in the P1 vs the P38 is an aluminum frame with a reinforcement, vs. steel frame. At a glance, it’s gonna be identical, and act pretty much the same.

    The VW Type 1 was never really produced at all during the Nazi era, even if the original designs date to then.

    (OTOH, I own a Luger, and it literally is a Nazi gun; it still has original markings here and there.

    I view it a lot like my Soviet-era Nagants – trophies of an ideological enemy.)

  5. “Am I now a nazi-sympathizer. . .?”

    Wow. I never thought about things that way. Because, if it hadn’t been for ex-enemy guns (German from both wars, and WWII Jap) I wouldn’t have had any rifles at all (centerfires, anyway) when I was growing up. Except, we had an M-1 Carbine that had been liberated from the U.S. military.

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