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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm picking up Hankins and Guelzo's The Golden Thread, Volume 1, on the strength of this review. So far it is hitting the right notes.
Working my way through a collection of Harlem Detective novels by Chester Himes.
He does a superb job at capturing how the criminal class talks to each other and interacts with each other. The setting is black Harlem, but it could easily be my white and hispanic clients, too. Just endless jabbering that goes nowhere, trying to pull one over each other or the cops with "clever" blather, trying to hype themselves up, etc. Utterly transparent once you see the pattern and usually only works at fooling themselves or other criminals who are stupid/high.
Always interesting to read pre-70s crime fiction and see the guns mentioned (not that the authors are necessarily that accurate or know much about guns). Mostly revolvers like 38 specials or .32s, maybe the occasional .25 auto, but rarely a .45 or 9mm. Whereas now when my clients get caught with guns, 90% of the time it's a 9mm, with a .45 or .40 putting in an occasional appearance.
So far as the guns go, laws were enacted in the sixties and seventies known collectively as Saturday Night Special laws. These made much of the existing stock of cheap shitty self-defense guns for poor people illegal to sell. These were most often small pocket automatics in "mouse" calibers like .32 and .25 as well as snubbie revolvers in .32 and .38. Probably into the eighties, these would have been the most common sort of gun stolen or used by criminals.
The eighties and nineties saw law enforcement coalesce first around the .40, then in the early oughts to the 9mm. Bullet technology brought the 9mm on par with the more powerful, larger cartridges and "won" the handgun caliber wars for the current generation. Today you can buy a gun the size and weight of an old five-shot Saturday Night Special .32 which carries twelve rounds of 9mm.
The downside is that the most commonly stolen guns are now better, smaller, lighter, with higher capacity and more powerful rounds than they were forty years ago. But they are still the cheap, shitty guns mostly. For every real Glock used in a crime, there's probably three Tauruses and two Kel Tecs.
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