Oh crap! Ah, phew.
Boy, they were not kidding about that soft Spanish steel.
"That belongs in a museum!" to quote the famous and notable archaeologist, Indiana Jones.
Well, these did belong in museums.
Unfortunately, the Spanish government chose to have
them crushed instead of preserved in museums,
which is really quite unfortunate.
Really, these are the only two surviving known examples of this,
which was a prototype design from the La Coruña Arsenal in Spain.
When it didn't pass military muster, instead of being preserved in a museum,
the surviving examples were all crushed and destroyed.
And it's only fortuitous that these two happened to get out of Spain,
albeit already crushed to the height of the proverbial pancake.
They are fascinating guns, and they have different features, and I can't show you any of that really
because they are utterly and completely destroyed here.
Now, what I want to talk about today is museums.
A little bit tangential to this, but
it made such a tragic/comic cold opener that I couldn't resist.
I have a hypothesis that museums have changed their focus
basically since and because of the internet.
So, bear with me here, I think originally museums existed
as a repository of knowledge, specifically ... for specialists.
So if you were the guy, the botanist, who spent 50 years
collecting and indexing and preserving butterflies.
That's the sort of collection that would go into a museum.
And anyone else who was interested in the subject,
and the more interested you were, the more detail you would want to see,
and the more really weird and rare and exotic examples you would want to see.
And that's why you went to a museum is you could see
either one really great collection or, better yet,
multiple collections amalgamated together.
And see everything there was to know about ... whatever the subject is,
be it gemstones, butterflies, firearms or anything else.
Basically everything that your society knew about this subject would be on display in the museum.
And that's the point of a museum, is to take one person's collection and knowledge,
and make it available to everyone, and pass that knowledge along.
Today museums, and I apologise, don't take this personally
the museum curators I know and respect who are possibly watching this,
today museums are much more like three-dimensional Wikipedia entries.
That's perhaps a bit harsh, but museums, instead of catering to the specialist,
museums now cater to a pretty low common denominator.
They cater to the average family: mother, father, two and a half children,
on vacation where kind of no-one really wants to go to any particular place.
But you ... make compromises, so dad gets to go to the gun museum,
and then after that they are going to go to the museum of modern art,
or ... whatever else everyone else in the family wants to do.
And the museum ... does its best to be relevant and interesting to the whole family
by reducing its level of specialisation to a very generalised, simplistic approach.
You can walk into a World War Two museum, knowing basically nothing about World War Two,
and you can leave with a pretty good understanding of the basics, of the timeline.
Here's what happened when.
And you'll see some neat human interest stories about some people who were in the war,
and what their experiences were like.
But frankly, it's not that much different than what you would gain
if you read the Wikipedia article on World War Two.
Sure, you will see some of these things, physical objects, in a way that you couldn't do on a computer.
And you may be able to see video or voice recordings of
people who were involved in the events, which you may or may not be able to do online.
But you don't get the detail.
If you are a very interested specialist in World War Two and you walk into that museum,
the chances are you are not really going to leave with anything you didn't already know,
and that's like the exact opposite of how museums used to be.
And my hypothesis is that the internet has basically replaced the museum
as the repository of societal knowledge.
... Even the best old arms museum couldn't really compete with
the amount of firearms information and diversity that's available on the internet today.
I can go to (not to toot my own horn), but I can go to my own YouTube channel
and find a vast array of interesting and unusual firearms.
I can go to discussion boards and talk to collectors all over the world
who are serious, dedicated, passionate specialists
in their own particular fields of firearm collecting,
and learn a tremendous amount of information.
More than any individual museum could ever hope to combine into one place and actually display.
And so the utility of a museum has really decreased, it used to be
if I wanted to see that great butterfly collection,
... I would save up my vacation time, and I'd travel,
and I'd go to the place with that museum specifically so that I could see
the museum collection and learn as much as I could there.
And I'd probably make trips back regularly.
As I learnt more, some of the elements of the collection
become more and more relevant and more interesting.
And all of a sudden like, "Oh, I understand this."
And I'm able to make connections between this area of the field and that area.
And today we can do that on the internet.
There is no need to try to drive across country
and visit far-flung locations with little obscure museums
because it's all available online.
And so in order to remain relevant, and in order to expand their appeal,
museums reduced their level of specificity and they become much more generalised,
to the point that ... anyone can walk into the museum
and have an enjoyable time, and learn something.
But they are appealing to the general audience and not to the specialists anymore.
And so I think that is the reason why we have very few good arms museums anymore.
And there are a few that are extremely good.
The Cody Firearms Museum in particular, the NRA museum.
... There are two of the few museums left out there
that have just a whole ton of guns all over the place.
Because it's a gun museum and you came here to see guns,
and for goodness sake, you are going to see a lot of guns.
Even those museums, however, tend to have more guns in the back,
in the reserve vault, than they do actually on display.
And that's largely just because of logistics,
the building just isn't big enough to display
every physical example that they have.
And unfortunately, in most places, in most museums,
the more rare and unusual a ... gun is,
the less likely it's actually going to get out on display.
Because the more rare and unusual it is, the less most people are going to know about it,
the less it was probably actually used in any sort of large scale.
The Vietnam War for example. If you go to a museum that has a display
on the Vietnam War, or an entire museum dedicated to the Vietnam War,
there are going to be some guns in there.
But you are almost certainly going to see an AK, an M16 and an M60.
You will not see a whole bunch of weird SPIW project prototypes.
Because, while they are of the correct era, ... they don't appeal to the generalist.
They were never actually used in Vietnam.
And so they are for us, the specialists, the most interesting things,
and they are the most likely to be back in the vaults.
Now the other common problem with firearms in museum settings
is the guns are not accessible to that internet community
that has become the shared repository of social knowledge.
And what I mean when I say that is, yeah, the guns are there,
and they are physically protected
(there are some terrible museums that don't take good care of guns,
but as a general rule museums do an excellent job
of preserving and maintaining artefacts in their possession),
because they are run by museum curators, and that's their profession
is curating and preserving and protecting artefacts.
The problem is ... when guns are in private ownership
... their owners are interested in them and excited about them.
And are very likely, and have the ability to take pictures and ask questions,
and share these guns, and their details, and their photos, and their interest
with other collectors and historians and researchers. And information circulates.
And if I ... have a question about something in particular,
I can easily write up a private collector
who has direct and immediate access to that gun.
And frankly, I'll probably get multiple collectors who all have a couple of examples,
and we can put together a really good batch of knowledge
and come to a better understanding of something.
When guns are back in museum vaults
the first issue is nobody necessarily knows that they are there.
Now there are some museums, like the Cody Firearms Museum, that
know what are in their vaults and they are very good with allowing access to it.
But that's not the case for most museums, where they are tragically under-staffed.
The curator's time is pretty much entirely spent on,
first off, museum bureaucracy and paper work,
but then actually just maintaining the collection and taking care of things.
And they don't have time to be doing a lot of detailed research
into the specific individual items in their collections.
This sounds counter-intuitive, but it's kind of like people who are
professionals in the firearms industry don't have time to do any shooting anymore.
Professionals in the museum industry, generally speaking,
don't have the time to do any research on the items in their collections.
And so a gun that is donated to a museum and put in the reserve vault
will probably never be seen again.
Where if that gun remained in private hands,
(it won't always be, there are plenty of private collectors who are secretive,
or uninterested in sharing anything),
but there's an equal chance that it will go to someone who will share it,
and will basically contribute that information to the collective pool of knowledge.
And so it's kind of a roll of the dice. But in a way the museum is the safe option,
but it's also the one that almost guarantees that the gun won't be accessible,
the artefact won't be accessible to people, and it's unfortunate.
And I know I am going to get some push back from museum curator friends of mine,
who may well be watching this. ...
And it doesn't apply to every museum out there,
but I think there is an expectation among the general public
that the museum system is a panacea for,
"Well, we don't necessarily have to have collectible guns,
maybe these are particularly dangerous collectible guns, or some people think so.
And so let's just put them all in museums."
And the reality is putting them all in museums
will kill their accessibility to historical research,
as much as destroying them will, in most places.
And that kind of brings us full circle back to these poor, destroyed military prototypes.
And frankly also to this guy, this is an A-76L, it's an Astra pistol.
It was a prototype design, a total of 29 of them were made
for evaluation by the Policía Nacional in Spain.
Only a handful of them survive anymore, and this one has a giant slot cut in the barrel.
Because that was necessary to keep it legal
according to Spanish deactivation requirements.
Which, when they were first introduced, ... would have seemed reasonable to a lot of people.
To me this is still unfortunate, tragic destruction of a nice historical artefact.
But, the idea that we'll just cut a hole in the barrel,
maybe a really big hole, and so it can't be used anymore,
and ... then it's deactivated and now it's OK.
Well, that's fine I guess, it's still wrong, but it gets done.
But the problem is it doesn't stop there,
and deactivation procedures are being changed regularly.
And increased in strictness, and their level of destruction of the artefact.
And so today this pistol is not legal in Spain in its current form,
it would be considered the same as a fully-live, functional gun.
And in order to be considered deactivated now,
all of the moving parts have to be welded in place,
the lips have to be cut off the magazines,
the guns have to be well and truly destroyed.
The same thing is true in England.
Old deactivation standards allowed you to at least have some moving parts,
[you could] disassemble the piece, you could learn something from it.
Today the deactivation standard is again
basically welding the thing into a solid chunk of steel.
We see it in Japan.
There is a good reason that Arisaka collectors are pretty much all in the United States.
In Japan the deactivation standards for a historic Japanese rifle
are so strict that the guns basically have to be welded
into completely solid, non-moving chunks of steel.
And you lose so much of the history doing that.
I mean, even at one end you have to be able to fire a gun to
really actually understand it.
I've had more than a few instances when
design elements of a firearm that seemed odd, or coincidental,
or that I didn't even notice in the first place,
their purpose became immediately obvious upon actually shooting the firearm.
The idea that you can learn everything there is to know about a gun,
and other artefacts in other fields as well,
just by looking at it in a glass case is, I think, fundamentally flawed.
And a lot of deactivation standards, should they become universally applied,
poses serious risk to the health of the historical and collecting community.
Anyway, I've kind of wandered off track a little bit.
Hopefully I didn't offend too many museum folks here,
museums are still valuable institutions.
But I think they have changed, I think their nature has changed, ...
basically since the internet really became a common thing.
Now, is our internet community doing better than museums used to?
That's an interesting question that I'm not going to touch on right now,
I've offended enough people as it is.
So, hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on the subject.
So hit me up in the comments, let's have a discussion about it.
Thanks for watching.