Our pal Sunshine Shooter over at the progunmillinennial website posted this very amusing post for the season.

Last time we talked about dressing up as icons of gun culture, but why not dress up as the guns themselves?

CZ

Super simple: just dress up as a hipster! Small-pattern button up shirt (buttoned all the way up), slacks that are about two inches too short, and suspenders. Add an overly-complicated mustache and a knit tie and you are set! Just like a CZ, you were the height of style about 50 years ago. Now you are obviously of a bygone era, and you like how unnecessarily fussy everything about you is. That’s what makes it cool! Except as soon as it’s actually cool, you’ll have moved on. Because you’re a nonconformist, just like everyone else that looks exactly like you.

Holland & Holland

This one is easy to come up with, but hard to pull off. Tweed jacket, wool pants, riding/hunting boots, and a break-over shotgun. Simple, right? The hard part is the price, because to truly dress as an H&H, you need to find a distinguished looking outfit, and then pay ten times what you should for it. Something like this $2,000 fleece twill jacket. Is it nice? Yeah. Does it do the job? Sure. Should it cost that much? Absolutely not. It’s an outfit that costs so much money you could have single-handedly fed all the homeless in a 8-mile radius for a year, but you needed something you’ll use once a year for a few years and then keep in the back of your closet. Just like an H&H.

Hudson Mfg

(see image)

Glock

An outfit that represents Glock would be something that describes Glocks themselves, generic. Functional? Yes. Pleasing in terms of aesthetics, usability, or even user comfort? Not at all. So, what would meet those criteria? Something that says “I know what I need to get the job done, and I absolutely do not know how I will look doing it.”? I’m thinking denim cargo shorts and a loose white T-shirt or polo, finished with New Balance shoes. I can respect a pure-performance focus on equipment selection, or clothing selection, but that’s not what’s happening here. Don’t get me wrong, cargo jorts and a t-shirt are, um, clothes, but anything more than that is just disingenuous. Like Glock. It’s a gun, and that’s it. It’s not stylish, it’s not ergonomic, and it only impresses people who have no idea what else is out there. There is a reason that there is a huge aftermarket for Glocks.

Springfield Armory

Asmost of us know, the Springfield Armory on the market in 2022 is not the same Springfield that used to make guns for the US military only having purchased the trademark in 1974. So, not only is what we now refer to as ‘Springfield Armory’ definitely not the American icon so many assume, but their most popular products, the XD, XDm, and Hellcat pistols, are all produced oversees. So, how do we represent that in our costume? Levi Strauss. Levi Strauss & Co. invented the blue jean, the quintessential American garment, yet those jeans are made entirely oversees.

How you actually put the outfit together isn’t terribly important, only that the Levi logo is proudly displayed, showing your foreign-sourced patriotic pride!

Oh, and they also support gun control. Both the clothes and the gun maker.

Canik

Imagine what a 12 year old boy thinks is cool, but having the money of an 18 year old. That’s what buying and carrying a Canik looks like. Caniks’ started off great. A proven design (the Walther P99), combined with the lower cost of offshores manufacture, and enough quality control to make the darn things reliable, and you have a winner on your hands! Then they started to branch out. Sub-models, performance versions, FX, SFX, Elite, Elite SFX, TP9 SFX Whiteout, what? There are literally dozens of versions of the same gun! But they are all stylized differently, and competition-ready or something. It really just reminds me of the graphic T shirt days of the late-00s. Which is why I believe the best way to represent your favorite Turkish pistol line is to don your favorite graphic T line: Affliction! Hell yeah, brother! Ain’t no one gonna mess with you when you’re wearing this badass shirt!

Conclusion

On second thought, maybe don’t actually dress up as any of these. The only thing worse than not dressing up for a costume party is having to explain your costume. Just go as something normal, like a vampire or a werewolf. The Hudson costume might actually work, though.

Stay spooky, and we’ll see you next Friday.

-S_S