Hell in a Handbasket

That is a good drawing of a Walther P99. Notice how the animator decided on a close up of the weapon, instead of simply opting for some full body shots of the characters as they struggled over the pistol. Below is a pic I stole from the Walther website which shows an actual honest-to-Betsy gun so you can see how close they got.

It goes beyond simply drawing the shape of the handgun. Sometimes they have action shots of the weapon at the moment it is fired, with the action cycling and the round ejecting. If they are really dedicated, they will even show the gas as it spurts from the ejection port.

See how the animator drew the hand? The way the trigger finger is bent at that odd angle? That is the way a hand and finger actually looks if someone fires a real gun.

I can tell that most of my audience is thinking this is a big ol' yawner so far. So someone draws cartoons and sometimes goes to the shooting range on his day off. So what?

The thing that puzzled me is how a Japanese national, working inside that decidedly anti-gun country, could get their hands on a firearm to see all that detail. After all, artists need some sort of model so they can see what stuff looks like at various angles. If they were just downloading pictures off of websites set up by American shooting enthusiasts there would be more errors creeping into the artwork.

But they just can't go to a Japanese gun store and handle the handguns kept under glass for display purposes. According to this webpage, the Japanese government allows a maximum of 50 handgun licenses to be issued in the entire country. But the culture hates and fears guns so much that they only allowed 30 people to have a privately owned handgun, with 20 of the licenses remaining unused. I don't know if this is accurate, but it certainly sounds right.

Anyone who has raised kids knows that the only sure way to arouse unshakable curiosity and fascination in the little buggers is to deny them access to something. Tell them that they absolutely may not touch the expensive suits and dresses in their parents closet and they will have them off their hangers and on the floor on the very day that you have to look sharp for your job interview. It would appear that many Japanese nationals have a similar fascination with firearms.

They manage to indulge their obsession in a very organized way. Some Japanese model companies have a line of extremely detailed firearm replicas for sale. Click on that last link and you will be taken to an English language website where you can look over some of the more interesting examples.

Just about everyone involved in the shooting sports knows about Airsoft guns, which are BB guns firing soft plastic pellets. Some Japanese firms go one further by offering highly detailed replicas which can cycle and fire fake ammunition. (I wrote about that in this post.) But they also make highly detailed replicas that can't fire anything, even though they can chamber dummy ammo and the action can be cycled by hand.

The level of craftsmanship and amount of research that goes into these toys is nothing less than astonishing. For example, take a look at the picture below.

That is a replica of a Model 1914 that was produced in Norway under license between the two World Wars. The markings on the gun are spot on, including the proof marks that inspectors would stamp on the slide after testing the gun as it came off the assembly line. Below is a picture of an actual gun so you can compare.

These Norwegian guns are extremely rare, and they are interesting to collectors mainly because the Germans issued some of these American-designed pistols to their officers during WWII. The fact that a Japanese model company is reproducing an obscure, little known historical firearm in such detail points up the obsession that comes from denying people access to something that is just so darn cool as guns.

Scroll around the site. Each picture tells a thousand words.