Shortage? What Shortage?

My guns have fallen silent. Mostly anyway. Ammunition is gone, back-ordered into oblivion. Prices are ABSURD. My poor 9x19mm children will likely spend their summer locked away in my footlocker. Even the once ubiquitous .22lr is impossible to find. So what do you do if you want to keep shooting? Well, you can always do some snap-cap practice. Or you can start shooting C&R guns. C&R, for those of you still pursuing gun nut status, is Curio and Relic--guns older than dirt. Anyone who has watched Gran Torino will tell you not to count the elderly out.

I am about to tell the internet's best kept secret, but with my meager readership, I'm not scared. Ammunition for C&R guns--especially those from former commie republics--is in plentiful supply, and still mostly cheap. I will email folks my sources if they inquire, but I'm not outing my sources just yet. After all, I still need a tin of 7.62x25mm (or 7.62 Tokarev).

My order of laughably overpriced 9x19mm was back-ordered again, this time until June. I was going to pay (don't laugh) $217 for 900 rounds of Wolf 9x19mm. Fed up with waiting, I cancelled my order and went to www.jgsales.com and ordered a Romanian TTC pistol chambered in 7.62 Tokarev. This round is a fantastically hot loaded roughly .30 caliber steel-jacketed bullet that shoots flat and straight...and can defeat most soft armor. Not that I plan on shooting many armored coyotes, but nice to know you could if you had to. Oh, and 1224 rounds of ammo costs about $150 after shipping.

Just a bit of background on my new hog leg: it served as the Red Army's standard issue pistol from 1931 to about 1965. Truth be told, the Red Army used anything that would go "boom" as a pistol clear up to the fall of the Soviet Union. For the Reds, a pistol was for either executing prisoners, or executing their own troops. That said, the Tokarev TT-33 (and its Romanian clone, the TTC) is a stout, accurate, and (by the numbers anyway) powerful pistol. I saw quite a few of them still in service in the Afghan National Army, as well as in a few American holsters.

This is my pistol. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Buying a new pistol just because you can find ammo for it may not make much sense at first glance. Until you realize that this rebuilt Romanian beauty queen cost me $247 after the transfer and shipping. I even paid $10 extra for the "hand select" option where the nice people at J&G sales will pick the best of five pistols to ship you. Extra magazines are $14 each, and it comes with one mag and an original holster. So the pistol cost me about $30 more than my laughably overpriced 9x19mm, will be here sooner (even though J&G is about two weeks behind on shipping), and I'll be able to shoot it more. In the internet vernacular: Epic Win.