Souvenirs of Death

This episode of John Nesbitt's THE PASSING PARADE, his long-running series of shorts for MGM -- and elsewhere, a radio and a television feature -- tells the story of a Mauser automatic pistol, picked up from the corpse of a dead German officer and taken home as a souvenir by a passing American soldier.

After it shot the family dog, it starts to make its way hither and yon until it falls into the hands of a bleak-eyed Morris Ankrum, a criminal who uses it for its intended purpose -- to make holes in people. Meanwhile, Nesbitt tells the story from the gun's viewpoint, precise, prissy, and totally uncaring about the havoc its owner wreaks. It all ends with a message from J. Edgar Hoover. While stirring music plays, the audience is told that these guns are bad things. The gun has already made it clear that it bears no responsibility for these matters. I agree with its logic.

There was Souvenirs of Death , the story of the life of a gun.

The title Souvenirs Of Death refers to a German Luger pistol which with the voice of John Nesbitt in this Passing Parade short narrates its life since it left the cold dead hands of a German officer on the field of battle in Europe. Two war souvenirs were extremely popular post World War II among GIs returning home, Japanese Samurai swords and Luger pistols from the Germans.

If the man who took the pistol off the dead German had really wanted to make the weapon safe then it seems that one would remove a firing pin. His young son finds the weapon, finds the ammunition for same (why in the world would you keep that) and the first tragedy of that weapon in civilian life occurs.

Nesbitt narrates how the weapon passes through several owners and even goes across country before it ends up in a final resting place so to speak. We even get J. Edgar Hoover warning about how these souvenirs are becoming popular in the underworld.

I can tell you the National Rifle Association will not approve of this short subject.

This was just a propaganda piece that our government is famous for to manipulate public opinion.

This short film shows a bunch of boys playing with a real, loaded pistol when playing war. One of the boys even deliberately inserts a full magazine into the pistol before playing with it. I was a kid in the 1960s. One of my favorite shows was "Combat". I and everyone I played with knew the difference between a real gun and a toy. Some of us had real guns in our homes. Most of us had bb and or pellet guns. We also had real hunting and bowie knives. When we played "Combat" we didn't use real guns or real knives, even though the TV show "Combat" had lots of scenes where knives and daggers were used to kill. A toddler might not know what a gun can do, but it's far fetched to show boys who are about 10 or 11 loading a full magazine into a pistol and running around playing war with it. On a technical level, I noticed that though the magazine was inserted by one of the boys, he didn't rack the slide to chamber a round. Therefore, the gun wouldn't have gone off when the trigger was pulled. If you want to use a pistol for self defense, you should carry it with a round chambered and if it has a safety, train yourself to thumb the safety off before shooting. Your other hand may not be available to rack the slide if you haven't already chambered a round.