Originally Posted by
Alferd Packer
After WW2, the Japanese exported cheap tin cap guns to the U.S.
The caps included with them came on yellow colored paper rolls and were made of black powder. They had the distinctive sulphur smell and were louder than american Kilgore company caps.The rolls were skinnier and american roll caps were too wide to work in the guns.
Perhaps some of you can remember this.
The confectionery typically sold these along with firecrackers and bottle rockets all from Hong kong.
But the Jap cap pistols were ten cents complete with caps that we all knew were black powder.You were never allowed to shoot the Jap caps in the house. They were louder and they stunk of black powder smell.
Also, my younger brother emptied a black powder shotshell on the sidewalk and pounded on it with Dad's good claw nail hammer and set off the pile and blew a chunk out of the hammer head that struck Dad's car next to him and put a deep dent in the door.zThose old cars had thick metal skins on the doors .
I am reminded of that old adage that no matter how many times you do a thing and nothing happens, it only takes one time for something to go wrong to kill you.
People in St Louis constantly run red lights at all times of the day and night. Occasionally there are horrific crashes with the cars flying apart as if a bomb blew them up. The people are in pieces as well.
But most traffic approaches a green light and has to pause and peek both ways cause the buildings are built right up to the corners and the streets are mostly at acute angles at the intersections.
Black powder is classified as an explosive, not a propellant the last time I looked.
I believe the story about the fellow who beat on the powder with a hammer to identify the powder as being black, but i also know that my younger brother could have killed himself or me if that chunk of hammer head would have struck either one of us in the right place.
There are CAS shooters who persist in loading semipointed lead bullets in tube fed lever action rifles claiming they have never had an accident with a lead bullet setting off a primer in the magazine.
Again, no matter how many times...the old adage.
Right now it is sleeting and icy outside as I write this. Traffic on the icy highways is mostly driving too fast for conditions and texting and talking on cell phones to boot.
Human beings are not to be denied their freedom.
Be safe.
God Bless all here.