I really appreciate the internet for its diverse communities of outdoors enthusiasts.
Facebook, for example, contains many crappie fishing groups from across the country, but if you're interested in connecting with crappie enthusiasts closer to home, you can join a site called Arkansas Crappie Fishing Talk, a closed group that contains about 3,300 members. For central Arkansas, there's the Central Arkansas Crappie Association.
Northwest Arkansas has the Beaver Lake Crappie Association and southwest Arkansas has the Southwest Arkansas Crappie Club.
Firearms enthusiasts can join any number of fan clubs, such as Marlin Firearms and the Ruger Owners & Collectors Society, or the 16-Gauge Shotgun group.
The local sites are useful for seeing what people are doing across the state, but they are generally bragging boards where people post photos of their latest crappie catches, minus important details. Posters seldom tell where they catch their fish, and they are usually evasive about generic details such as water depth, clarity or jig color.
Naturally, some of these sites are peppered with the negativity that is inherent to digital media. The "Arkansas Crappie Fishing Talk" administrator posted a warning that says, "If you have something negative to say, just keep it to yourself. Anyone else making sly marks about another's catch will get the boot button."
The firearms sites, in contrast, are full of useful information. Through the 16-Gauge Shotgun group I learned that Browning was finally shipping its new Sweet 16 before any of the guns arrived in Arkansas.
The Marlin Firearms site contains multiple exchanges on how to correct feeding problems, how to remove magazine tubes from neglected rifles, whether you can safely fire 9mm +P ammo in Camp Carbines, and where to find parts and accessories.
My favorite posts are of hunters posting photos of deer, elk and other game they shot with their Marlin lever guns. In this age of super magnum bolt rifles, it is refreshing that many hunters still enjoy hunting with archaic guns and their archaic cartridges, like .30-30 and .35 Remington.
A raging debate among the Marlin group concerns the merits and demerits, respectively, of the pre- and post-Remington Marlins.
This is a prime repository for the ignorance and misinformation that permeates most firearms message boards.
Purists and their disciples swear that only Marlins produced in North Haven, Conn., with JM stamped on the barrel, are worth owning. The Remlins are junk, they say. They're poorly assembled, they don't feed right, and they don't shoot straight, especially the early ones.
Never mind that I own the ninth Remlin ever made, and it is superb.
Polite queries reveal that Remlin haters have never shot a Remlin, never handled a Remlin, and often have never seen one.
But they know somebody that knows somebody that did.
The most interesting exchange on this topic flowed from a question about whether the Remington/Marlin controversy is equivalent to the pre- and post-1964 Winchester Model 70 controversy.
A more accurate comparison is the Belgian Browning Auto-5 vs. the Miroku Browning Auto-5.
When Browning discontinued its relationship with Fabrique Nationale in 1976 and licensed production of its beloved Auto-5 to Japan's Miroku, Browning enthusiasts raged.
Never mind that Miroku used better steel in its Auto-5 barrels that was compatible with steel shot, and that interchangeable choke tubes made Miroku Auto-5s more versatile. Miroku's modern manufacturing processes were tighter, and Miroku generally put nicer wood on Auto-5 stocks than FN did.
The post-64 Model 70, in comparison, was an entirely new gun with an entirely different action and styling. It had nothing in common with the pre-64 except the Winchester name.
We forget that Winchester's quality control suffered greatly from the mid 1950s until 1964, and that pre-64 Model 70s from that era often had major mechanical and cosmetic problems.
So it was with JM Marlins for several years before the Remington takeover, especially when the North Haven workers learned of the impending takeover and abandoned quality control entirely.
However, the merger made JM Marlins collectible because there will be no more of them, just as the Miroku switch immediately turned Belgian Brownings into a 2 million-plus limited edition.
Collectors talk down the newer versions to increase desire and demand for the older editions, which inflates value.
It's always fun to discuss these things with like-minded folk, and that's the real value of internet communities.
Sports on 01/26/2017