Sipsey Street Irregulars: My Sunday visit to the Springfield Armory Museum.

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

My Sunday visit to the Springfield Armory Museum.

When I realized that I would have some time before flying out of Hartford's Bradley International on Sunday afternoon (yes, Malloy, you missed your chance when I was in your AO), I asked around to see if the Springfield Armory NPS Museum was open early enough in the morning to visit, for I had never been. Not only was it, but I was able to catch a ride with a marvelous young family who had also wanted to see it.

We got there before it opened at 9am and walked the grounds. This ridiculous piece of "imagined ordnance" was sitting outside, advertising a display of what turned out to be a perfect waste of museum space. Still, I wondered if this is R&D for what the Obama administration intends to give our U.S. Army redlegs instead of 105s and 155s in the near future.

While we waited, you couldn't help but notice the irony of the signs on either side of the entrance denoting the Springfield Armory as a "gun free zone." Of course since I had come naked through the tender mercies of the TSA I was unarmed, but my host grumbled with good reason.

Once inside, though, the museum was a great experience. Here, I am pointing out to my friends in one of the World War II vintage display cases, an M-1 Garand rifle grenade attachment and an out-of-place post-war M-31 rifle grenade.

Inside the movie theater where they show you the introductory film is an excellent display of early machine guns, including early Gatlings, the Nordenfeldt, the "coffee mill gun," the Maxim and an M1917 designed by John Browning.

I picked up a couple industrial histories of the Armory at the gift shop as well as an official "Springfield Armory M-14" ballcap, which I will take out to the Big Spring speech this weekend after I get some additional embroidery done on it.

For those of you who are local, this coming Saturday, 21 June, is "Armory Day" from 10AM until 4:30PM Eastern with re=enactors doing cannon and musket firing. There will also be music, dancing, military encampments, etc., and would be a great time to take the kids and visit the museum. The event and the entrance to the museum displays are free of charge. You can't beat that.

4 comments:

Unknown said...: I haven't been there in years. It is a great experience. Sadly, it is located in Massachusetts. Our "politicians" have never met a gun control law they didn't like.; June 18, 2014 at 3:35 PM
Average Moke said...: What a great place that is with some great history ! - even the whatever the heck that thing is in the second picture must have been worth checking out.; June 18, 2014 at 11:01 PM
dan said...: now that's irony right there :
no guns allowed in a gun museum; June 20, 2014 at 1:51 PM
Paul X said...: Even the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming (!) does not allow guns, though it contains one of the most amazing gun collections in the world.

Talk about giving aide and comfort to the gun banners. But no banner would ever ban museum guns. In fact they want guns only in museums...

I think the Museum trade attracts a certain freedom-hating mentality for some reason, just like the medical business.; June 20, 2014 at 8:09 PM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

My Sunday visit to the Springfield Armory Museum.

4 comments:

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