Sporting Arms
- Elephant Guns
- Cape Guns
- Buffalo rifles
These guns are all seen as reminders of epic expeditions, pioneering railroad expansions into wilderness areas, and of the golden age of big game hunting throughout Africa, India, and the United States. To sum up their fascination, collectors have been known to use the phrase "if this gun could only talk" when they hold a historic piece - guns such as a Boer War era Mauser rifle stamped "OVS" (for Oranje Vrij Staat - Orange Free State), a "Trapdoor" Springfield Model 1873 cavalry carbine from the Custer era, a Martini-Henry .577/450 single shot rifle with dozens of successive ordnance marks from England, India, Nepal and Tibet, or a well-worn Winchester lever action rifle with its stock studded with American Indian tribal brass tacks.
Read more about this topic: Antique Gun
Famous quotes containing the words sporting and/or arms:
“The Boston papers had never told me that there were seals in the harbor. I had always associated these with the Esquimaux and other outlandish people. Yet from the parlor windows all along the coast you may see families of them sporting on the flats. They were as strange to me as the merman would be. Ladies who never walk in the woods, sail over the sea. To go to sea! Why, it is to have the experience of Noah,—to realize the deluge. Every vessel is an ark.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Even though I had let them choose their own socks since babyhood, I was only beginning to learn to trust their adult judgment.. . . I had a sensation very much like the moment in an airplane when you realize that even if you stop holding the plane up by gripping the arms of your seat until your knuckles show white, the plane will stay up by itself. . . . To detach myself from my children . . . I had to achieve a condition which might be called loving objectivity.”
—Anonymous Parent of Adult Children. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 5 (1978)