The championship is over; I had attended all the three days, mostly helping in running it smoothly (because this is not a Kenyan organization, and the shooting federation's officers therefore, from president over sports director to the legal officer, see themselves as servants of their members and not as Anointed Leaders, and they try to offer service, not liidaahsheep.... but I digress). I had been grading and marking the targets (in simpler words, deciding e.g. whether the location of a specific bullet hole on the paper target already counted for the 10-ring (the max), or still was a 9) and was accounting and adding the overall scores; meaning to add - mostly in head, sometimes by pocket calculator - some 30 to 45 single numbers to an aggregate, for each discipline in which a shooter had started, and we had about 1000 starts or more. My own targets were marked and graded by a colleague, as behooves (and yes, he even miscalculated my results badly - we are human and so it can happen to ourselves on the receiving end, what poetic justice; but I spotted the error and it was corrected).

My own targets, yes; for I still found time to shoot a bit in between for championship honours. Self-loading bigbore rifle at 100 metres (4 rapid-fire series of 5 shots each, prone position, not more than 35 seconds per each series). I could now exalt myself for being "previous and new national champion"; but the less glamorous truth is that I was the only competitor in this specific sub-discipline (lots more in smallbore and medium bore). Ah, never mind, it sure sounds good, if not in Kenya, then at least in the true Kenyan spirit of credentialism.

What is more, when I shared my annoyance about being able to start merely in one discipline now (no pistol, for as you will recall: the ammo had not arrived in time; and I had no stocks left, and none of the four gunshops of our upper-middle-sized European city had these specific cartridges which are of an uncommon caliber), and when I thus fished for verbal hugs and declaration of solidarious pity, my young friendly bubbly co-marker offered me to just use her husband's rifle; some ammo would be found by providence, she asserted.
As offered, as accepted. I got the old Swiss K 31 repeating carbine (which I had never fired before), which was sighted in to someone else's eyesight to hit God knows where, with a mixed batch of scratched-together 7,5x55 ammunition, and not one excess round: Swiss military (from 1979, but supreme quality... well, just Swiss, you know; clichés can be true), then 20 shots of Portuguese-marked but Yugoslavian-made commercial ammo, and a few shots of true Serbian commercial from Prvi Partizan (the factory that the Heroic US Air Force tried to destroy in the Balkan war; but their bombs and cruise missiles only ruined an administrative building and the workers' cafeteria, while production facilities had safely relocated underground). Amusingly, I did not even fare badly in this spontaneously improvised start; my results sufficed for one additional third place in that sub-discipline.

So, what will I do with the ammo? The two hundred rounds of 8x57 IS rifle ammo are Romanian surplus from 1971. They had probably waited, stored away well-packaged, in a climatized storage bunker in a military facility during decades, for an ideological war that thankfully never came. And when the Carpathian vampire was ousted and executed by his people, at long last, it happened so quickly that the stooges of the old regime were just swept away. A few have been swept back in the meantime, but the ammo at the time stayed where it was, and now has been sold on the civilian market. Some UN bureaucrats will bite their knuckles and self-serving Kenyan NGO do-gooders will tear heir hair and jump from one corner of their spacious offices to the other, crying like Rumpelstilzchen, flabbergasted that the ammo was not solemnly destroyed, as they feel is the only rightful option (yeah right, big funeral pyre in Uhuru Park, and all the media vultures clicking away at the flame pictures). But actually, sportive shooters and competitors now can frolick because got high-class training ammunition (quite reliable for civilian purposes, as even 100-year-old cartridges will frequently ignite and fire) for a cheap price, about 25 Euro-Cents per cartridge after taxes and retailer profit. I had my gunsmith order directly from the importer-wholesaler, and he only kept a very small mark-up beyond the 19 % general sales tax; for we are close, almost friends. My roommate,a student of theology, likes the sight of the this ex-military ammo; the glossy dark green lacquer of the steel cartridge case and the bright red sealant varnish ring between cartridge case and the copper-coloured actual bullet remind her of Christmas tree ornaments, she says. Hmmm... maybe... but we must be careful not to get the cartridges placed too close to the wax candles, I think, otherwise the tree will become rather loud and emit fumes...

Older are the 2000 rounds of pistol ammo, formerly military 7,62x25 Tokarev/Mauser. The light drab grey steel cases show their age a bit more: made in 1951 in Czechoslovakia, as the bottom stamp around the primer indicates. The factory that made them is still one of the largest civilian ammo producers worldwide, exporting everywhere, including Kenya. Their quality has certainly risen from "cheap and copious for the capitalist currency payers" (pre-1989) to "middle cheap and decent quality" in a worldwide open market now (2007). Still, older shooters will not easily give up their time-hallowed and well-conserved prejudices against "the smelly junk commie ammo". Fine. You pay four times as much for yours, if that makes you feel better, and I will fire what my pistol cheaply eats, unless it begins to burp.

How technics surpass and cross borders... this cartridge case was originally invented by the emigrated German-American inventor Borchardt, in 1893, in what counted among the very first semi-automatic pistols - a contraption which in its quaint fin-de-siècle elegance looks like it did walk out of a 19^th century science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The Austrian inventor and industrialist Ferdinand Ritter von Mannlicher, plagiarist and copycat par excellence, who would make many a Chinese product pirate of today pale with shame, copied it for his own pistol in 1895 and called it 7,65mm Mannlicher. The German Mauser brothers (whose name is still today as synonymous for a repeating bolt-action rifle as Colonel Samuel Colt for a revolver) then took the cartridge, nodded approvingly at it, boosted its performance, looked at the Borchardt pistol, shook their heads over it, and through their employees, the Feederle brothers, shortly in 1896 came up with the famous C 96 Mauser pistol, the first self-loading pistol ever to become a real commercial (and military) success. It would serve Austrian archdukes, German aeroplane pilots, Chinese warlord generals and their beautiful haughty daughters, and already in 1898, a young cocky British cavalry lieutenant with too much panache and less brain than his horse, who in the battle of Omdurman owed his life to the rapid fire from his ultra-modern C 96 pistol against the onslaught of several of the Mahdi's dervish riders, while his fellow chevaliers still swung their sabres, wielded their lances or fired old Webley blackpowder revolvers. Our lieutenant thus survived by virtue of the latest German technology, to become later better known as Sir Winston Churchill, Germany's triumphant adversary in two World Wars.

The development did not stop there. Imperial Germany did safely escort Vladimir Ilyitsh Ulyanov, called "Lenin", in a sealed railway car from safe Switzerland to soon-to-become revolutionary Russia, after the 1917 armistice. Communist Russia later on fought against imperial Germany, and still later amiably collaborated with the Weimar Republic in all matters military; republican German Reichswehr officers regularly trained in Communist Russia, exercising all the tacky weaponry (like tanks and airplanes) they were forbidden to have under the Versailles Treaty. Whereas Russia, in 1930, adopted the 7,63mm Mauser cartridge, gave it an ideological look, decreed that it henceforth had to be called 7,62mm Tokarev, and in 1933 came up with the fitting pistol for it. A pistol which still today is commonly found with Kenyan criminals. But I sometimes wonder whether it is not just always the one selfsame Tokarev TT-33 pistol that is pressed into the open hand of a slain mwananchi by our courageous boys and girls in blue, only to be sequestered and then recycled at the next opportunity again. What a gun.

I play idly with the cartridges and see that every single round of them is marked by a lengthwise black lacquer stamp on its grey side: 7,62x25 SM (SM, here, is not a delicious passionate pastime of consenting adults, but the abbreviation of the importer and distributor). Hmm... one of those typical differences between the nowadays Nation of Gilead (formerly know as the US of A) and Europe. Here as in contrast to there, everybody has - among other prerequisites - first to pass a thorough proficiency exam before receiving a firearms licence, and one should and could thus expect a knowledgeable shooter to recognize and know what rounds will fit into his gun; and yet, the benevolent Powers Over Us have decreed and ordered in their paternal legal wisdom that the coded military factory stamp "aym 53" on the bottom is too risky for Doofus Dumbo, and that the full calibre designation must be added by the importer onto surplus ammo if it had not already been imprinted on the cartridge case bottom. Ah yes, product safety... "read manual first, do not attempt to use the microwave to dry a wet domestic pet".

The little brown cardboard box which holds the 50 loose cartridges (no money left here for the orderly paper or plastic spacer inserts which in commercial ammunition hold each cartridge in its place and row) bears further indication for the pampered and demanding consumer of today: "85 grains bullet, iron core". Which might sound special and menacing, but isn't. Already in World War II, the merciless military and the bean-counting ordnance factories concluded that the human fighting animal (endowed, under modern warfare conditions, with far shorter a useful combat life than his very rifle or pistol) did no longer justify too much of an expenditure in order to be killed. Metallic lead, the usual material for the core of a jacketed modern bullet, was expensive, and rare, especially under the exigencies of a total war economy. So, inside the tombac outer jacket of the bullet, a core of a cheap soft iron was put, to be enveloped only by a cushioning thin lead sleeve that still allows for the necessary deformation when the bullet is forced through the lands and grooves in the weapon's barrel. Thus, killing another conscripted human was made cheaper by maybe a tenth of a cent more. What progress.

"Hard as iron", one says... but an iron core is not a "hard core", technically, and it is not "armour-piercing", with the international legal limit set at 400 hardness Brinell. I wonder whether I should be sorry about this. Legally, it puts me on the safe side, because hardcore ammunition is considered munitions of war, for which no licenses to civilians are issued, and heavy penalties are applied. Now, one may doubt whether the world is made any safer if a 70-year pensionist ammo collector who possesses a 65 years old single rifle cartridge with the obnoxious "black tip" in his possession, among 2000 legal others (these harmless smurfs are like stamp collectors, only more punctilious and pedantic), shall be dragged into court and tried for such abominous crime, as has happened again and again... but the NGO small arms limitation specialists swarming Africa like locusts will certainly explain to you that their hallowed internationalized rules need no exceptions for reasons of reason. "Fiat iustitia, dum pereat mundus!"

Even if the cheap old Czech military iron core ammunition does not meet legal and technical requirements to qualify as hardcore, it is not really softcore either. Which might just be an advantage, had I ever to use the pistol in earnest in Kenya. Many a reader will have come across a reference to armour-piercing or "cop-killer" bullets in the press, which takes its usual journalistic licence for granted. In the Global North, it is usually the Good Guys who wear bullet-protection vests or body armour; and increasingly now also Good Girls. Indeed, an upstart small new US enterprise, SavvyArmor, fostered and bred within the octopus-like monster company "Armor Holdings", caters especially to female law enforcement officers, and does so in a rather impressive and positive way: their friendly self-presentation and marketing style is very different from the swashbuckling macho posturing of the other companies which woo a perceivedly male audience. From heavy, cumbersome armour suits that made their wearers look like a medieval knight and move like a two-legged turtle, the trend since 30 years has moved towards light, flexible body armour tailored from ballistic nylon fabrics (Kevlar) and similar materials, with optional ceramic insert plates for additional protection against heavier calibres, such as rifle rounds.

In Kenya, it is different. Ordinary Kenyan police(wo)men (notably the especially endangered APs on object guard duty, who practically are just walking or standing targets) do not usually wear body armor. Only Flying Squad officers, Rhino Squad and special GSU platoons wear heavy body armor, and the former Spider Squad (decoy officers of an anti-rape stakeout unit) must likely have worn modern light body armor under civilian clothing, but in general, the heavy bibs lying somewhere in the police stations are too clumsy and uncomfortable to be worn over any extended period of time.

The bad guys in Kenya, on the other hand (among whom frequently are police officers themselves, such as recently in the bloody robbery executed on Thursday 17^th May against Barclays Bank in Westlands) often have body armour. Now, the fast 7,62x25 Tokarev cartridge with iron core bullets has enhanced penetration capabilities and will indeed penetrate many lower-category light vests (NIJ threat levels I, IIA, II, even some IIIA) that would stop 9mm Luger FMJ or .38 Special bullets, not to speak of the slow .45 ACP. So, they might even prove to be of advantage, were I to carry my pistol in Kenya with a certificate or temporary permit (once these latter were to be re-established).

One last observation. Upon receiving the new old ammo, I proceeded to try it on the shooting range. The cartridges impressed with very loud muzzle blast and significant recoil. When disassembling the pistol in the evening for a thorough cleaning (the old primers are corrosive and would make the barrel rust within just a few days), I noticed that the barrel bushing - the sleeve surrounding the barrel's muzzle and securing its position in the slide - had been deformed and could not easily be turned and taken out. But, and that's the important aspect of it, the accuracy of the pistol had been improved. The last group that I shot (with the already bent and slightly deformed barrel bushing) proved to yield a much better accuracy than the first one, when the part was still pristine.

I wondered whether that might not be generally typical: isn't it so that only after some professional deformation, best results are consistently achieved? On the other hand, a stressed and deformed part may be prone to break soon, so... the better performance might be bought with a higher risk of eventual failure and breakage. In guns as in employees. I will have to think about it, and to calculate the risk.