My wife and I went camping with a friend of mine who said he was going to bring a couple guns that we could shoot if we wanted to (oddly he doesn’t mention this in his post…hmmm…). When we got to the campsite we discovered that our friend hadn’t brought a couple guns, he brought an arsenal. Several pistols, a couple assault rifles and a shotgun…all we lacked was the will to invade and the next town over could have been ours. (Actually, considering where we were, I bet we were the least heavily armed people within 40 miles)

Another friend of mine has been hard a work on her next book about dudes who shoot. Guns. She decided to do a little research by going to the shooting range and taking a few shots herself. Shots with guns.

I am just not a gun person. I’ve had wacky things happen when trying to fire a gun (once while trying to fire my friend’s gun it jammed on me after every single shot, despite the fact that he was able to fire the entire clip without any problem), but there’s lots of shooting going on. When the bullets start to fly during whatever the next “end of the world” scenario is, I need to be ready. I’ve picked my weapon…

The Pepperbox .45. This gun was made in the 1830s to try and find a way to let people fire off more shots than one without having to stop and reload. For this gun, a person still had to stuff ammunition down the barrel like other guns of the time, but the Pepperbox had not one but six barrels that rotated for each new shot.

The entire barrel rotates.

This is my gun. The idea of a gun barrel working like this is utterly preposterous, but it’s got flair. The gun even has a wide smooth surface perfect for engraving all sorts of frilly messages. Mine would say “Viscount Plsek & the Proper Pollent Pepperbox.” It would say that, because that’s what it would say.

If I gotta go via some horrific calamity (my friends on facebook tell me—often—that the zombies are a comin’), I want to be holding one of these. Of course, all I really need to do is get that totally creepy look on my face from the painting and no one will come anywhere near me.