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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

A few years back I found a youtube channel about unusual guns.

And it was fascinating because they had all these zany, really distinctive guns like four-barrelled shotguns and revolver-rifles.

Unfortunately they ran out of such weapons pretty quickly and the channel devolved into a lot of "this gun that looks and works just like every other AK-47 is interesting because it was made in Hungary, and most Hungarian AKs received an upgrade but this one didn't" which I personally felt was a bit of a snoozefest.

But if you're interested in seeing a great many very minor variants of mundane items, you might like gun history.

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I wonder if you are talking about forgotten weapons with Ian McMullen. I could understand if you would get tired of seeing 50 different iterations of the same rifle. I take it as it is interesting to see how each country in the Warsaw pact or countries that the Soviet union supplied technical packages to, such as North Korea, China, or Vietnam, iterated on the design. How did they improve the design or what were there limitations in manufacturing. What can be learned from the changes they made.

For such, to each their own.

There’s an interesting museum in Cody, Wyoming that has thousands of guns, including some very interesting ones like whaling guns from the 1800s. Well worth a visit if you have an interest in firearms, especially from the ‘Wild West’ era!

It’s also one of a set of four museums, all of which are very interesting: Art, Natural History, Firearms, and Buffalo Bill.

https://centerofthewest.org/explore/firearms/

There’s a restaurant in Orinda that has a collection of antique firearms on the wall a revolver rifle, an elephant gun, some weirdo pistols with knives on the barrel. It’s super interesting to just see them in person. I’ve never asked for any of the stories.

The evolution of firearms is quite interesting because it reflects centuries of progress in chemistry, metallurgy, mechanical design, warfare, and so on. You can definitely tell a compelling story and keep going for a good while.

The problem is that collecting often devolves into obsessing over insignificant details, simply because there's more of them - and if you run out of, you can invent new ones. Look at people who collect coins or stamps and fawn over minor minting or printing defects, etc. The same goes for art collectors, comic collectors, you name it.

I find inverted jenny iconic:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/US_Airma...

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