Remember the auction we noted earlier in the week? The one that included some of Bonnie and Clyde’s guns?
Well, by way of SayUncle, we learned that there was a bit of a kerfuffle. One of the guns in the auction is a Colt Detective Special that was found taped to Bonnie’s thigh. Frank Hamer, the man who led the posse that reduced Bonnie and Clyde to “a bunch of wet rags” [*], took that gun (and many, if not all, of their other guns) as spoils after the ambush, and it got handed down from Hamer through a couple of other folks before ending up in the auction.
So what’s the problem? The serial number on Bonnie’s gun was obliterated, and BATFE doesn’t much like people selling guns with altered or obliterated serial numbers. Serial numbers, as I understand it, were actually not required until the Gun Control Act of 1968, so there are guns out there without serial numbers. But if the gun did have a serial number, like Bonnie’s did, and that serial number is defaced or altered, you can’t legally sell the gun.
What to do, what to do? If you’re the auction house, you contact your friendly local BATFE branch. I will now pause for a moment so you can laugh at the juxtaposition of “friendly” and BATFE.
In this case, though, BATFE issued a new serial number for the gun, and had the gun re-stamped, making it all nice and legal for the auction. SayUncle and some of his commentators seem a little bent out of shape about BATFE doing this; personally, I’d rather have them do this than have the gun confiscated and melted down.
While I was writing this entry, Lawrence sent me an actual link to the auction. Bonnie’s Colt is here.
The “Fitz Special” that I wrote about previously is here. Looking over the auction description, a couple of things jump out at me. There are three documents giving the gun’s provenance, from various law enforcement officers, but there’s no Colt factory letter documenting the gun. The price of a Colt letter, according to their website, is $75; that’s a small percentage of the estimated auction price, and I’d personally like to see one of those letters with the gun before I bid (were I planning to bid; yeah, like I have $50,000). It might help document the story that Clyde stole this gun from a Texas Ranger. I strongly suspect (and the auction notes seem to confirm) that this is not an actual Fitzgerald modified gun, but one done in his style.
Why, yes, as a matter of fact, there is a Smith and Wesson Hand Ejector in this auction. And it has “a copy” of a factory letter. There’s also a “Baby Face” Nelson Safety Hammerless (Third Model) with a S&W factory letter, too. And a .44 Double Action First Model top-break carried by Emmett Dalton, also with factory letter. Except for those three, it seems that choosy gangsters chose Colts.
[*] That description, and some of the other background in this post, comes from Jeff Guinn’s stunning Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde
, the definitive work of Bonnie and Clyde scholarship and a book I enthusiastically recommend.