Hi Guys! Thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com. I'm Ian McCollum and I want to share just a little bit
of a pet peeve with you here today
And that is people who buy guns based on stupid marketing names and I have two particular offenders in mind.
One of them I actually have an example of and that is the Gray Ghost
P38. This I believe originated with an InterArms Company ad they had
Basically dug up a stash of a bunch of late war and post-war
P38 and what did they do late in the war well things were getting difficult?
So instead of doing a nice fine bluing job on a p38. They parkerized it. It works just as well.
It's simple doesn't look nearly as nice. But who cares it's late in the war yet the pistols out there they'll work
Just fine. Now I have this one not because it is a great ghost
But because it's actually very at the very end of French production of the p38 in 1930, ah
1946 and that's why I think it's cool, but there are plenty of people out there who bought late war kind of eh
condition p38 because
InterArms slapped this a wooo
Exotic name on them of the Grey Ghost. Now, this means nothing and the worst
Offender in this realm I think is actually the Black Widow p38 again, wooooo
The Black Widow it Wow
You know that must be pretty cool and I'm sure every single one of them was personally captured from an SS Colonel
Now the reality of the matter and the Gray Ghost is just a stupid advertising name
the Black Widow bugs me a little bit more because the the idea of it what people have been
trained to to understand it as being actually kind of
Obfuscates the historical the collecting reality of what the black widow actually represents. So I
Should define this a black widow is a Mauser production 1941 or 1942
Luger with black grips and
Depending on how serious the seller is, maybe black plastic magazine floorplate as well
so
Being Mauser production for those years. It will be marked with a BYF code on the toggle that was Mauser's code designation and
In total Mauser made about a quarter million Lugers during these two years
1941 and 42 it took them they kept producing Lugers after the p38 had been adopted while, while the whole German
military military-industrial complex was attempting to transition from one to the other so
Mauser I think their last ones they made in 43 at any rate
They made a lot of these Lugers and as early as 1939
they were actually experimenting with and using black plastic or
phenolic, resin bakelite grips because they were cheaper to do than wood and wood became a more scarce commodity for the
military
Because they needed so much of it for things like k98 case stocks
At any rate Mauser started making these things Krieghoff did as well and they started putting them on the guns as early as 1939
Not a lot of them but by 1942 it was something like 30% of their production had these black plastic grips
At the same time they were also
Simplifying and economizing their bluing standards and you ended up with a gun where unlike pre-war examples
None of the small parts were given this really fine gold and straw blue. Everything was just
Dark blued and it comes out looking vaguely black
So you compare it combined that?
with black plastic grips and you put it in the hands of a guy named Ralph Shattuck who was for decades a
huge institution of Luger buying and selling in the US and
He needed a way, wanted a way to sell these kind of generic
Mid-war Mauser production Lugers for more money. What does he do? He gets the brilliant idea to give them a fancy exotic name like..
woooo Black Widow and
the term stock and we're still stuck with it today Shattuck passed away in 2010 his
Stupid advertising name for these guns apparently will never die. So
I mentioned that this obfuscates the actual collectability of these guns. Well, here's the problem Mauser
Mauser was making these as early as 39, but if someone hands you a 1939 Luger with black plastic grips on it
As a you know, well, that's not a black widow. It's the wrong date. Therefore. It must be wrong
This is how you know these ideas kind of metastasize
When in reality that's actually a pretty rare example of Mauser very early
Transitioning away from wood and into black plastic. Now, the other problem is the grips aren't serialized and
Even in the field if you had wooden grips and they broke or got damaged
They might very well be officially replaced with black plastic ones. It didn't really matter
They were identical in function and people didn't keep track of this sort of thing. So
however, when you get the black plastic grips getting this extra
Basically out of nothing fabricated collector value
everyone starts putting black plastic grips on these guns, so
Every single 41 and 42 Luger now has black plastic grips on it
So it's a black widow and it undoubtedly was single-handedly captured off of an SS Colonel. I'm sure
And so where we originally maybe could have preserved
You know kept these guns as they were actually issued and have some idea of what were they actually doing?
What wood was it plastic?
Well,
if you look at them today a huge number of them have been swapped to black plastic because woo black widow so,
that is just a pet peeve of mine that I've been wanting to mention for a while.
If you, the thing is there's nothing inherently wrong about these guns. They are what they are.
But if you're going to buy one, buy it because you understand what it is. Not because,
some marketing guys 50 years ago got the good idea to try and hook you in with some sexy sounding
aftermarket name for it. So gray ghosts. Forget it.
If you want a late war P38, if you want a French occupation
P38, which by the way are really good deals and collectible P38 because no one gives a crap about them.
Except me and maybe a couple other people.
Fine get one but get it because of what it really is, and the same thing goes for a Luger. If you want a
mid World War two Mauser production Luger
There are a quarter million of them to choose from go ahead and find a nice one. It's a nice example of you know
Very late use of a very early automatic pistol. That's cool, but don't buy it because someone called it a Black Widow