The Old America – IOTW Report

50 Comments on The Old America

  1. I saw them for sale somewhere. And here in RC they still make and sell rubber band GUNS nationwide.

    a guy rode to Sturgis and consequently through South Dakota a few weeks ago. When he got home people asked what it was like. He pondered for a while and then answered “It was the America I remembered”.

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  2. they used to have cap-gun revolvers that held little plastic percussion caps in the cylinder … very close in look & sound to a starter’s pistol … like a snub-nosed .38, but a little smaller

    anyone else remember those?

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  3. ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ…Yep….my Dad drilled out the diffuser in the barrel and that little pistol shot out 3 to 4 inches of flame….and then he took it away from me…. he knew me well…LOLOL….

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  4. Maybe I ought to keep my cap gun, it’s up for sale in my Mom and Dad’s estate sale. I just can’t keep everything, it’s been heartbreaking 💔 letting go of their thing’s and mine. I just don’t have kid’s to leave them to.

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  5. Rolls of caps, leaves in the gutter, little plastic army men, magnifying glass and you had the battle of the Chosin reservoir….then the magnifying glass was taken away….

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  6. I just read a report about a Utah town where they were protesting against masks. It was in a tweet, and the comments were overwhelmingly snide, shocked and angry that how DARE these subhuman scum get up up their hind legs and complain about masks.

    We are going to have to carve out some Old America places, aren’t we? Fortunately the carving can likely be done with a butter knife, if these mask-broken twitter simps are any indication.

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  7. @ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ
    I had a starter’s pistol that fired 22 blanks. The pistol frame was made from two halves, split left to right. One side had a hollow barrel and the other was solid. The flame from the round could travel out the open side, but there was no room for a bullet. I recall buying it in the 70’s at a store in Martinsburg, WV. I was probably about 12 at the time. I think they weren’t supposed to sell it to me, but the clerk either didn’t know or didn’t care.

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  8. By age four, I wore my double six-guns around all day and was known as “Two Gun Pete With The Smelly Feet.” I used to do chores just to earn cap money from my Mom. A nice box of caps was 10¢ at the 10-cent store.

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  9. I don’t even know how many toy guns I had as a kid. They were ubiquitous throughout society. Got ‘em for Christmas, got ‘em for birthdays, got ‘em just to get ‘em. I remember waking up after a nap one afternoon after mom had gone out shopping and SURPRISE! she’d tucked a brand new six-shooter under my pillow while I’d napped.

    You want to see a childrens movie that would horrify modern sensibilities? Get yourself the dvd of Little Fugitive. 1953. Children being children in New York. And the lead always has his six-shooter strapped to his side. And nobody even bats an eye. The horrors!

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  10. I remember hitting a roll of caps with a hammer. Most of them went off. I also recall cutting the caps (the bump) in half and wiggling out the powder on foil paper to make a big pile of powder to use in a small home made pistol. We also had rail road torpedoes, they were LOUD. We would put them on small sections of Rail Iron and dropped a old iron for clothing with a rope hung from a tree branch on them. They only went off with impact. They were used to signal the engineer on a train that trouble was ahead. Never lost an eye or a finger. Don’t tell anyone.

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  11. I had a Mattell Fanner 50 cap gun which was a little 6 shot revolver that fired little rubber bullets out of a cap gun on a belt when you thrust your belly out back in the early 60’s. And yes I also still remember the smell of caps being blasted from a cap gun. I miss the real America of when I was a kid prior to Vietnam and the late 60’s messing everything up.

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  12. Why I can’t stand the new super hero movies these days – because the actors playing heroes, in real life, can’t tell the good people from the bad. Don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground. Super hero pfft!!

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  13. Don’t remember the brand but I had a Thompson that you could put a roll of caps in, pull back the charging handle, pull the trigger and let her rip. You’d get about 20 shots in auto mode before you would repeat the process. Was pretty cool as smoke would drift out of the barrel when done.

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  14. @Gladys – GLAD you mentioned DB. Always been a fave of mine and @JImmy – Davey Crockett was the first ‘king of cool’ and he died in action btw.

    I was JUST talking about him to my crew the OTHER day. Remember the Alamo?

    SOME traditions continue!!

    And, I bought my own first coonskin cap when I was TWENTY years old on a trip out west…Who did not want to be the great Davey Crockett??

    Good call @Willysgoatgruff…

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  15. Marco. I carried a pocket knife all the way through high school. In 4th grade I whipped it out to help my teacher (a Nun) and she said, “Nice knife.” And I said, “Yeah, my Dad gave it to me.”

    Try to imagine that today. The kids now aren’t getting taught anything worth while and their teachers are idiots with nothing to teach.

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  16. Our house was situated on a reservoir in the NY ‘burbs and the Canadian geese used to fly in and birth their goslings. The problem was, the geese used to like to hop out of the water and onto our back lawn. Which wouldn’t have been so bad, except they would walk around quacking and crapping. This would leave burn rings in the grass around the little green and white cables they left.

    But what really frosted my dad’s patootie was when he would mow the lawn and hit one of those old hardened cables.
    So he got one of those Daisy BB guns and whenever the geese would come to call, he clipped them out of the dining room window that overlooked the lawn. Which sent them running back to the water.

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  17. 1941 kid here. I remember collecting shot waxed paper shotshells for the smell – Dad and friends would shoot hand trap out of our back yard in upstate NY. Dad started me shooting a .22 when I was about 4, resting on couch pillows and shooting prone out the French doors of our living room. Later, in the South (4th grade on), I could walk through town with my .22 or my shotgun to go hunting squirrel, rabbits and dove after school without drawing a second glance. We all had cap guns before we were old enough to hunt and played shoot ’em up games all the time. We all carried jack knives all the time and would have sharpness contests – shaving the hair off our arms or cutting paper smoothly. We’d play “stretch’ with the knives during recess. Good times for all and all gone now.

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  18. We used to play a game called “Whoever makes the best fall” The kid who invented it was my next door neighbor, youngest of four. He had a way older brother who was a Green Beret in Vietnam and another brother who was Army, also in Vietnam. His dad had been Army in WWII, Pacific theater. The whole family shot .22 target practice in the back yard, and my dad muttered disapprovingly. He never fired his Mosin-Nagant unless we were way up at our cabin in the woods, where he could fire safely across the Chattahoochee river.

    Anyway, the “Whoever makes the best fall” game was thus: One guy manned a machine gun nest, and everybody else charged the machine gun. Everybody got mowed down, but one guy always took out the machine gun with a grenade. The machine gunner picked whoever made the best dying fall, and that guy got to be machine gunner next. Then the previous machine gunner got to throw the grenade in the next charge, but he couldn’t win. You get seven or eight guys, and that game could go on for an hour. And then we all became teenagers in the 70’s.

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  19. @Anymouse – NOT off topic at all.

    Old america goes to older expectations like respect, but in NYC at a time even before the ‘stop or else’ from the 50’s-60’s, the open hanging ‘billy club’ (hardwood) for the first weapon to be used…once that got removed from standard daily issued, a lot of this shit started.

    Yeah, they have those expandable metal ones these daze but nothing like seeing the dark stained CLUB.

    We have one in the foyer at the door with the leather still on it, ready.

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  20. @ghost ~ my dad used a ‘blackjack’ back in his policing days … some call it a ‘slapjack’ … a flexible woven leather strop w/ a lead weight embedded in the head. remember slapping it in my palm on occasion … man, that thing hurt!

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  21. When I was a kid, we could get all kinds of firecrackers.

    They can cause a lot of damage though – the local Roxy movie theater was burned down in 1958 by bad boys in Elvis hair-dos tossing firecrackers around during the movie. Nobody was injured that I can recall.

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  22. AA gave me a cap gun for Christmas with 1000 rounds of Ammo as a stocking stuffer a few years ago. You can still git them.
    Works and still smells the same like when we were 10.
    PS I was wrong 5000 rounds.

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