"This is where it goes from stupid to insane," Henry said, "and lots of people, me included, think this was the main plan all along. ATF started adding rifle ammunition to the ban list. Every time the ATF discovered a single example of a handgun made to fire a rifle caliber, all steel-cored ammunition in that caliber became verboten. Some guy built a single shot handgun on an XP-100 action for long range shooting in .308 Winchester, and when the ATF found this out in 1983, all importation of steel-cored military .308 ammo was halted, and selling a single round of it suddenly became a felony."

"Same thing happened to 7.62 x 39 rifle ammo ten years later," Allen Kane added. "In 1993, despite everybody begging them to scrap the idea, the dumb cocksuckers at Olympic Arms in Washington State built several prototypes of a five-pound repeating 'handgun' based on one of their AR-15 type receivers. So ATF immediately put that caliber on the ban list, for any ammo that had steel cores. Which was ninety percent of the stuff coming in the country."

"And the only reason the steel-cored ammunition was made that way was because steel's cheaper than brass or lead," Henry explained. "Which was why the stuff was loaded in steel cases, too."

"There's some lead-core stuff out there," Kane went on, "and it's much deadlier. Goes through vests like cardboard, just like any high-velocity rifle round, and fragments inside the we arer. ATF didn't give a fuck about that. They were the experts. They said one pistol made it a pistol caliber, so it was banned." "The only exemption to the 'cop-killer bullet' ban, like the immunity from most laws, is for government and law enforcement transactions," Henry Bowman explained to Ray, who was still looking baffled. "And this exemption applies, in some circumstances, to situations where the ammunition is not actually sold to the government or law enforcement agency. And that's where Allen's deal comes in. He's got this deal going that came about because of design work he's been doing on the U.S. M60 machine gun."

"Bottom line," the Indiana man said, "the M60 sucks. It's the worst machine gun ever adopted in the last fifty years by a major army. United States Army adopted it in 1960 to replace the recoil-operated .30-06 Browning 1917 and 1919 models, and whoever signed off on that decision ought to have his balls cut off and fed to him."

"What's wrong with it?" Raymond asked. Allen Kane took a deep breath.

"It's as if someone looked at ten early-design machine guns, and incorporated all the worst features into a new design.

"They took the unsupported bolt and piston post design from a Lewis gun, only instead of using good quality heat-treated steel like on a Lewis, they made it out of soft, shlocky shit that falls apart right away.

"They claim the M60 is based on the German MG42, but what they really mean is it's made out of stampings. That's fine, but the designers left out the MG42's sear trip. Instead of making it so the bolt slaps the sear trip when you release the trigger, and slams the sear into the 'engaged' position, the sear on the '60 is connected directly to the trigger. As you let go of the trigger, the sear tries to gradually engage. The bolt is flying back and forth all the while, hammering the engagement edge. So the sear gets worn immediately, and pretty soon the gun starts running away on you.

"To close the top cover, the bolt has to be cocked. If you try to close it when the bolt isn't, you bend stuff.

"The front sight's fixed and the rear sight's adjustable, which is the exact opposite of what you want on a gun with a quick-change barrel. Put on a new barrel, and your gun no longer shoots where it used to. By the same token, they put the bipod on the barrel instead of the receiver, so you have to carry a spare bipod with every spare barrel, which is stupid.

"There's not enough locking lug area on an M60, so after fifty rounds the gun has ten thousandths excess headspace, which makes it batter itself harder as it fires and causes frequent case-head separations that tie up the gun.

"To compound that problem, the chamber's cut so that the case head protrudes 150 thousandths, instead of the more common 125 thousandths of other NATO caliber machine guns. That means you have to shoot ammo with extra-thick case heads. If you shoot stuff designed for the normal NATO chamber, like all the U.S. ammo loaded for the GE Minigun, the case head blows right in front of the web. That blows the extractor into the barrel extension, and you need a workbench, a vise, and a power grinder just to get the gun apart and the broken pieces out of it.

"If the gun has the right ammo and does keep shooting, then the gas regulator will vibrate off. That's why the factory tells you to safety-wire the regulator, but that means you have to cut the safety wire off every time you want to clean the gun.

"The regulator itself is what they call 'self-adjusting', which really means it does not adjust at all. If it works okay when the gun's dirty, then it flows too much gas when it's clean and the gun beats itself to death. If it flows the right amount when the gun's clean, then there's not enough gas volume when the gun gets dirty, so it quits firing.

"The extractor and ejector springs are weak, so cases drop into the receiver instead of being kicked out. The receiver's tiny, with a side ejection port, so you can't get your fingers in to clear it. John Browning's beltfeds all have big receivers, and they eject out the bottom, so gravity keeps 'em clean.

"On other belt-feds, the cartridge is brought halfway into position in the feed block when the bolt goes back and extracts the round from the belt, and the cartridge is moved the rest of the way as the bolt goes forward to chamber it. On the M60, though, the entire positioning is done on the rearward bolt stroke, and the belt remains stationary as the bolt goes forward. That's why the M60 belt jerks so much as it goes through the gun, unlike other guns that spread out the movement.

"I always point out that a good indication of the quality of any weapons design is the number of different countries that have made it their standard issue weapon. Practically the only countries other than the United States that ever adopted the M60 were ones like Vietnam and the Philippines, where we gave the goddamned things to them. The Australians bought some without us breathing down their necks, probably when they were drunk, but now they've wised up and the '60s are history.

"On the other hand, about thirty countries have outfitted their soldiers with Belgian MAG-58 machine guns and paid for the weapons with their own money. The MAG-58 is basically the receiver of the 1918 BAR turned upside-down and adapted to use linked belts instead of detachable box magazines. Henry likes BARs," Kane added.

"And Allen likes MAGs," Henry threw in.

"Damn right. Field trials showed that the MAG would outlast the M60 by a factor of about forty to one, and about four years ago, the United States Marine Corps said fuck the M60s and replaced 'em with MAG-58s." He paused and drank some orange juice.

"Anyway," Kane continued, "SACO Defense is one of the primary contractors now supplying the Army's M60s, and they want to keep the business. They also want their guns to function better and last longer before breaking. One of the executives at SACO was at Knob Creek in '93. That's a big machine gun shoot in Kentucky. He was at the shoot in 1993, and he saw all the junk M60s that guys had pieced together and registered before the 1986 ban." Kane stopped and looked at Henry. "Does Ray know about how they fucked us in '86?"

"No, but I'll tell him later. Go ahead."

"Okay. Anyway, all of these guns had been functioning even more unreliably than factory-produced M60s, except the two I was shooting. So this guy comes up to me, and he starts asking me how I got them to working so well and I told him tha-"

"Nonononono," Henry broke in immediately. "That's not how it happened." He turned to Ray and grinned broadly. "What really happened was, there's a cease-fire so they can go put out more junk to shoot at, and this guy comes over to where we're shooting, and he says something to Allen like, 'These other people with their rewelded M60 are having all kinds of jams. Your guns must be original', or something like that.

"So then Allen here, being such a diplomatic devil, what does he do? He immediately says, 'Shit, no, mine's not original! The originals are even worse than those other rewelds you see on the line. The design itself is bad enough, but the dumb bastards who built the thing didn't even bother to machine the parts right. I played with the cam angles and changed the timing; mine'll go two, three times as long as a factory-new one before it breaks. If I could try a little different heat-treat on a couple parts, I think I could double that again. It's still junk next to a MAG, but the dumb bootlips at SACO Defense can't even put the sears in right-side-up.'"

Kane was laughing at Henry's imitation of him. "That's right, I did say that to him didn't I?" he admitted. "Well, hell, I didn't know who he was," Allen Kane added defensively.

"And that's when the guy tells Allen that he works at SACO, and he's in charge of quality control, or some damn thing, and would Allen fly up there and show them what to do," Henry added.

"So I go up there," Kane explained, "and I look around, and I tell 'em I need a million rounds of ammo and ten of their guns, and I'll figure out how they can make them better, given the constraints of their tooling. They just about shit when I told them that much ammo for ten guns, and I'm thinking 'Jesus, don't you guys shoot any of this stuff before you ship it out and expect some kid to bet his life on it?' That's when they tell me that all ammunition at SACO Defense is technically the property of the U.S. Government, and can't be released to a private citizen."

"Keep in mind that Allen is offering to do this work for free," Henry threw out, "and at the same time, the government is burning billion-round stockpiles of .308 ammo to destroy it."

"Yeah, and I even offered to return all the fired brass to prove that I hadn't taken the ammo and sold it. They still said no."

"So what did you do?" Ray asked. He found the entire conversation appalling.

"That brings us to the current situation. SACO finally agreed to pay for the test ammo out of company research funds, but I had to get it cheap. So I found some out-of-date Israeli .308 AP for a nickel, delivered. It would go for more than that in this country, except they won't approve it for importation 'cause it's a socalled armor-piercing pistol round, as we were explaining. I've applied for an import permit based on the fact that it will be used for government testing, but it hasn't been approved yet. And I'm not holding my breath."

Ray's eyes narrowed in fury at the whole bizarre situation. I don't know what the hell I was expecting to come home to he thought angrily. But it sure as shit wasn't this.

"I like your friend Allen," Ray told Henry after Kane had left. The two men were sitting in Henry Bowman's study. Ray Johnson looked around the room. Floor-to-ceiling shelves of books lined two walls. On a long table in the corner sat an extensive computer setup, complete with two printers, a flatbed scanner, and an office-quality copy machine. A drafting table stood in the corner.

"I wish he lived closer. We try to get together to shoot every couple months. And mere's Knob Creek twice a year, but that's become a zoo, with all the interest in historic weaponry that's sprung up in the last decade or so."

"You work out of your house?" Ray asked, nodding towards the electronic equipment.

"Yeah. All these articles in magazines were saying how everybody was going to start working at home, but I think it's a bunch of crap. If I had a family there'd be no way it could work. As it is, I can turn off the phone and it's just like being in an office.

"But what you see here is typical for lots of people, just for personal use. Take out the extra printer and the drafting table, and swap the copier for something smaller, and you're looking at a setup millions of people use for non-business stuff."

"Are you on this new thing, the...the Internet?" Ray asked, remembering the name he'd heard. Henry chuckled.

"Yeah, but I hardly use it. All this stuff about the 'Information Superhighway' is a bunch of hype. 'Information Cow Path' would be much more accurate. Anybody can send anything anywhere, which is good, but it results in three problems: "First, unlike making a thousand identical phone calls or addressing and sending a thousand identical letters, you can send a message, long as you want, to a thousand addresses with just a few keystrokes. There's mountains of junk to wade through, and the temptation is to blow it all off.

"Second, assholes take particular advantage of the increased ability to send messages. Sending someone a hostile message is now called 'flaming' him. There's been more and more of that, too.

"Last of all, and partially because of what I just mentioned but mainly because it's in their nature, our old friends the feds are real keen to get into the act. The government has actually proposed that a device called a 'Clipper Chip'-and I don't know where that term comes from or why they call it that-be installed in every privately-owned computer in the U.S. It would have an encryption code in it. To prevent theft, or some damn thing, that's the supposed selling point.

"The thing is, the government would have all the master encryption codes. This electronic gizmo would give the feds access to all information stored in every privately-owned computer in the country."

"What?"

"That's right. Sort of like-"

"But that's an absolute violation of the Fifth Amendment!" Ray broke in. "The Fourth and First, too."

"No, it isn't, Ray," Henry said patiently, with a sickeningly sweet smile on his face. "This is for everyone's own good, don't you see? You'll still be able to write things down with pen and paper. You'll still be able to get together and talk about things in private. For now, at least," he added with an evil grin.

"But back when the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they could not possibly have foreseen the advent of computers. They never would have imagined a time when just anyone could express his views to a huge audience, just like they never would have imagined guns that fire more than one shot without reloading. If they had, they never would have written the Bill of Rights so broadly. This 'Clipper Chip' is for our own good, don't you see?

"And besides, now we have the Drug War. The Founding Fathers never imagined huge illegal businesses using computers to hide their money. Why, they never even thought anyone would want to hide their money in the first place-they wrote that old Constitution over a hundred years before we realized we had to have a federal income tax.

"The President himself said last month that we have too much freedom in this country, and we need to look more towards the greater good for our society as a whole." Henry smiled without humor as he watched Ray shake his head in wonder and disgust. "I keep forgetting that you've been gone for thirty years, and this is like stepping out of a time machine for you." He leaned back in his chair. "Nineteen sixty-three," Henry mused as he looked at the ceiling.

"In 1963,1 was ten years old. I'd had my first gun, a Winchester semiauto my dad gave me, for two years by then. In the Spring of 1963, Dad bought me my first revolver, a K22 Smith. About the same time, I bought my first centerfire, a 98 Mauser I got from Charley Steen, with money I'd saved up helping Dad with photography work.

"Six months later, my dad, my uncle, and an old friend of our family all got together and gave me the best birthday present I've ever received in my life. Uncle Max gave me this original 5" .44 made on that special run for H.H. Harris in Chicago," Henry said, patting his hip. "Dad gave me a matched pair of Hensley & Gibbs 8-cavity number 503 molds, and Irwin Mann gave me five thousand cases to load. I've still got a few hundred of them, and I guess I've loaded and shot about quarter million .44s since then. No, that's only eight thousand a year, so it would be more than that. Half million, maybe." He took a deep breath, and reflected some more.

"In 1963 and 1964 I was shooting about every other weekend during the school year, and at least every other day during the summer. I don't think anyone else in the sixth grade was shooting as much as I was, but I'd say about half the boys had their own .22 rifles, and at least two of them had handguns. Ted Swenson had a nickeled Smith & Wesson Kitgun and Beau Hadley had a Government Model his dad gave him with a .22 conversion kit in it. He couldn't hit moving targets very well, but that gun was as accurate as any .22 conversion I've seen, and Beau could put the whole magazine on a five gallon bucket at a hundred yards.

"When you left this country, Ray, every time a bunch of gun guys got together in somebody's study like we're doing now, or more likely in somebody's basement, or in a gun shop, they only did one thing: they talked about guns, or reloading info, or going shooting. At least, that's the way it was here."

"Yeah. Same way in Colorado, and Massachusetts, and New York City. I used to hang out at Griffin & Howe, and that's all anyone ever did there."

"That's not what happens now," Henry said simply. "Now they all talk about how to fight the constant onslaught of legislation." He pointed to his computer and printers. "My high-tech electronic stuff over there? In actual fact, I use my word processor, FAX, and modem twice as much to fight for my civil rights as I do for anything that earns any money."

"Really? How so?" Ray asked. Henry shrugged before answering.

"Grassroots civil rights groups have popped up all over the country. Lot of them have computer bulletin boards, and if you've got a FAX line on your computer, you can log in and see what the latest outrage is that your state or national legislators are trying to sneak by. Here in Missouri, we get ten or fifteen bills a year trying to make just about anything involving guns illegal. Every year we see bills that would make it a crime to have a cased, unloaded gun locked in the trunk of your car within a thousand feet of school property. Last year, some kid in St. Louis County got a map and drew a line 1000 feet outside every school boundary. You should have seen what it looked like. Every time you drove somewhere to go shooting, you'd be breaking the law. Legislators didn't give a shit. Same bill comes up every year.

"There's bills that would prohibit owning more than five hundred rounds of ammo. Bills that would make you pay a thousand dollars a year if you own more than ten guns, and make it flatly illegal to have that many if you live in a community of more than 250,000 people. Proposals for ten thousand percent taxes on handgun ammo. Bans on clip-fed semiautos with threaded muzzles, bayonet lugs, or pistol grips, not just imports but domestic guns, too. Bans on the magazines themselves.

"A perennial favorite here in Missouri is a bill that would make it a crime if you ever had a gun somewhere where a minor could gain access to it." He snorted. "So much for teaching gun safety and proficiency to anyone under eighteen." Ray Johnson sat there with his mouth open. What his friend was describing was almost impossible to believe. Henry wasn't looking at him, and didn't notice.

"If you're really gung-ho, like more and more groups are becoming, you get some legislators that understand the issue, and you introduce reform legislation. Take the offensive, instead of always fighting defense. That's what the guys around here have been doing. I give 'em ten thousand or so a year, but that's just a drop in the bucket against all the free ink the press gives our enemies," Henry added sadly. He looked out the window and breathed deeply.

"You know, my grandfather grew up in a farming family at the end of the last century. His family never got a nickel from the government, which I know was exactly as he thought it should be. He worked his way through college and law school, and he saved much of his earnings from his law work. Patent law was his field.

"In the 'twenties, a man came to him who had designed a better plow disc. He was looking for backers. Grandpa knew something about plowing, so he watched the man demonstrate his design, and helped him get the financing. Some of the money came from Grandpa's savings-enough to where he owned about a seventh of this start-up business.

"The company did well. The crash came in '29, but they were still in the black, they had no debt, and since they were a private firm, no one had bought stock on ten percent margin and gotten caught in a short squeeze.

"The big ag products companies were all being hit by the raft of farm foreclosures, and they took notice of this private company that was still enjoying decent sales and making money with a good product that had patent protection. One of them made a buyout offer. This was in 'thirty-two.

"The big company was strapped for cash like everyone else, and its stock price was in the basement. Knowing that, and also knowing that getting the rights to produce the new disc could put the big guys back in the black, Grandpa talked his board into demanding an all-stock deal. That appealed to the buyers, except with the market value depressed, they had to give up more of their company than they really wanted to, but they did it. Grandpa ended up with a little less than one percent of the company."

"What company was it?" Ray asked. "Are they still around?" Henry smiled.

"Yeah, as a matter of fact, they are. Had a name change not too many years ago. Deere & Company. John Deere, to you." He became serious again.

"Point of all this is, whenever the little company made a profit, which was every year except the first one, they paid taxes to the government. When John Deere made a profit, it gave a big part of them to the government, too. Right now their corporate tax rate is about forty percent.

"Now, John Deere, after they pay all that corporate tax, they almost always declare a chunk of what's left as dividends. Guess what? The money gets taxed again. In the '60s and '70s, the rate was seventy percent, both for my grandfather, and then my mother, after Grandpa died. Reagan managed to twist Congress' arm and get the personal rates down to twenty-eight percent, but with the corporate rates thrown in, the feds still got about half our share of the company's profits by the time all the subtracting was done." He stared at Ray Johnson.

"Then Bush caved in and kicked rates back up in '90, and in '92, this new slime bucket succeeds in getting Congress to raise the rates retroactively to before he took office, and-"

"What?" Ray interrupted. "Retroactively? What are you talking about? That's unconstitutional!"

"Tell that to the President," Henry said with a grimace. "You're the goddamn lawyer. I'm just a geologist, so what the hell do I know?" He laughed humorlessly. "Did you just think your ranch had had an especially good year and your deductions were down when you got your last tax bill from your accountant?" "Actually, that's exactly what I thought," Ray admitted.

"Yeah, well the retroactive section probably cost you an extra few thousand, over and above the time after he took office. Anyway, point I'm trying to make, the feds have taken over half of my family's share of the profits down through the years. But that's just the tip of the iceberg." Henry began to tick off his points using his fingers.

"Taxes on John Deere's profits had already been levied twice each year, once on the corporate earnings and then on the dividends paid out of the after-tax net. Then Grandpa's earnings as a lawyer were taxed every year. Grandpa was pretty frugal, and out of what was left, he bought four residences and several cars over a forty-year period. Then he had to cough up real estate taxes and personal property taxes on those things every single year. Then, every time he sold one house at a higher price than he'd paid because of inflation, he paid taxes on the so-called profit, even though the new house he was buying was even more expensive.

"We haven't even gotten to the big one yet. When Grandpa died, there was estate tax due, and the bill came to forty-seven percent of everything he owned. My parents had to sell off half of everything he had just to cut a check to the feds. The house, all the cash, all the bonds, all the stocks other than Deere, and a bunch of the Deere stock vanished overnight.

"My father died five years later, my mother, ten years after that. In '78, at age twenty-five, I had to go through the same process to settle her estate, only in my case I had to cut a check for fifty-three percent of the value of everything my family owned. Mom had two houses that I sold, but there wasn't much left besides the Deere stock, so almost half of that got liquidated."

"That must have been right around the time you came on safari with me," Ray said after doing some figuring.

"I settled up with the feds just before I went," Henry agreed. "So by now," Henry went on, "the government has taken over half the earnings of the company my grandfather helped build. They've also taken about two-thirds of the value of the company itself.

"On top of that, they take close to forty percent of everything I earn as a geologist and forty percent of all the profits from any successful venture cap deals I finance. On the Deere stock I have left, they take forty percent of Deere's earnings, and forty percent again on the cash dividends I get, which are paid out of what's left. If I want to diversify my investments, or raise capital to finance a start-up business, I better get the money somewhere else. If I sell Deere stock, the feds take about a third of the proceeds right away, since I've held the stock for so long and its value is a lot higher than my cost basis.

"The thing to remember is that during all of these years that we've paid all these taxes to the government, not a single member of my family has received one nickel in subsidies of any sort. We have not gotten a penny from Medicare or Medicaid. We have not burdened the public school system with even one student. My grandfather and father paid in to Social Security for a total of fifty years without drawing a single check. After Dad died, I got his Social Security for seven years, but an average of ninety bucks a month that ended when I got out of college was nowhere near as much as he'd paid in, let alone expecting any interest or growth.

"I figured it up a year or so ago. Totaled up the taxes I've paid to date on earned income alone. Didn't count taxes on dividends or interest or gains or estate tax on inheritance, just earned income. The total was six times the taxes on all sources of income paid by the President of this country and his wife added together. And I'm five years younger than either of them!" he added emphatically.

"I have never lied about my income, or knowingly wr onged any person in any way. And you know something, Ray?" Henry said, looking at his friend. "I've paid every one of those taxes without complaint, even when the President announced that people like me weren't paying our fair share of the nation's bills.

"I've been a damn good sport about it, and you'd think the government would leave me alone to make money so they could continue to take half. But instead, they pick the one thing I really like to do, something that's a fundamental right supposedly secured by the Constitution, and they do everything they can to take that away from me." Henry shook his head, and Ray suspected that his friend was not quite finished.

"I've never said this out loud, but you know all those hours I've spent developing my shooting skills? All the money I've spent on ammunition, and club memberships, and on my private range here, and all the time I've spent training other people to protect themselves, including lots of women and police departments, always for free? I think the government should say, 'Hey, Henry Bowman, good job! We want people to be skilled and safe with guns. We want them to be able to protect themselves from harm. We want everyone to be self-reliant. We wish we had more people like you, with good gun skills and a lifetime of experience to pass along to others. Keep up the good work!'