Q&A 32: Curatorial Adventures with Ashley Hlebinsky

hey guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm meeting with Colin and joining me today is Ashley Lipinski who is curator of the Cody Firearms Museum here in gorgeous me to blast me they've got a little rough wind and rain but that's pretty normal aren't four feet of snow or tornadoes so I consider that to be a week yeah yeah so the Cody Museum has just reopened with a huge new redesigned layout that you guys spent years many mid months many many years I've been with the organization for about eight years and we've been really seriously doing the renovation since 2015 when I took over jeez yeah it just recently you shut the whole place down for it's like six months to actually about nine months so like it was like quite literally a baby um yeah we we closed the museum last August and many people got really mad at us but you got to do what you got to do and then we did a temporary exhibit and well that was all going on and we opened two galleries in May towards the end of May and then we opened everything July 6 yeah well it looks gorgeous if you're in Cody you should have stopped before you should definitely stop you named you sorry there are some cool interactive pathways as well as guns are more visible they're kind of better organized I think yes thank you but they're organized historically rather than just by manufacturers so we've got sections by manufacturer for collectors that want to go in and look at that but really the whole museum is organized by whatever historical topic we're discussing which i think is really neat and I don't know if many museums do that right now so anyway today we are doing a Q&A session so I always for these things I solicit questions from the folks on patreon who support forgotten something as possible I figured I'm gonna be here in Cody we should talk to you about Museum stuff Museum stuff a subject you have significant expertise on so I have two pages of questions here and let's dig right into them a bunch of people asked a variation of this question yes oh I don't have one particular person to attribute it to but it is how does one become a firearms museum curator and as a follow-up how awesome is it uh well it's really it's not easy so in the US it's kind of weird it's like my little soapbox you can't really go to school for firearms history kind of like you can go to school for art history I understand in Europe at certain places you actually can get more of a focus degree like that but so my degree is in history my Master's is in history but the you you specify here what you studied with him Mack and Varion so I studied kind of a macro firearms history and really looked at the perception of guns and culture so I could attract all of gun technology and then watched how it changed how that you know affect a culture in society and how we kind of build up to where we are today and so that wasn't my son Ethan in grad school and while I was doing that because if you're gonna work in a museum you gotta get real hands-on I would spend about three years Smithsonian's National Firearms collection and so if you get your degree you can be real sneaky and you gets any guns out right it's good to get a certificate in Museum Studies so that you have that kind of camera experience don't just go for a Museum Studies degree because it doesn't give you kind of an area of expertise that you'll need and then internships jobs practical shooting anything gun related minimal gunsmithing do it because it really helps because these objects are so technical that if you really only have the academic like snooty kind of interpretation on it you really don't quite understand how they operate so it's kind of a combination of those how awesome is it well I'm about to go on vacation so I mean he published have asked me a question afterwards but it is pretty cool but I think a lot of people don't quite know what my job is so curator usually means you get to focus on one specific group of objects within a collection Purdue scholarship design exhibitions which is a part of my job only I run the whole collection which is 7,000 guns and 800 years of history but I also run the museum so I also have to deal with you know the bureaucracy and the day-to-day the budgets to keep the museum up and running which is a little weird for curator and so a lot of people think my job is like I'm always hands-on the collection I've always just you know knee-deep in guns but that's what I wanted to do that's a collections manager you want to do that that's a collections manager so I basically do a little bit of all the different components that go into running the Curtin Firearms Museum okay how many firearms museums are there so it can't be that many Oh myth Nicholson who's a scholar at the Art Institute he did kind of a comprehensive website list gun museum specifically I don't know maybe four or five you got Jim Davis ever any museums without it Cody Cody yeah well obviously but and then there's a lot of really good collections that are within museums and that's a really interesting thing is the fact that you've got you know most museums have something related to guns and there are very very few people trained in both museums and firearms and so there's really a dearth in that field and it's something that people are really needing because of guns you do have a whole host of different things you need to know including the legal side of it if you're not working for a government museum but there are great collections everywhere some really good private collections I think you and I both know about yeah all right next question is also came in from a bunch of people in various forms how do you maintain guns in the collection especially ones on display like do you have someone who takes guns out of the display and dust them off do you keep them like what do you do from boiling them we do dude don't sue our museum is an American Lance museums accredited Museum and so we have to follow the kind of standards of museum care with everything and so we're not technically all of our firearms are functional they all have their firing pins and that's something some museums do and I don't support that but because we're preserving them forever we don't shoot the collection and that's something that used to be very common in museum collections and mom museum or firearms are really durable objects if you're trying to preserve them forever you know you don't shoot them however there are some kind of ways around that now that we've got the museum open we might do some non-carbonate collection where you can shoot it for research purposes but for the most part you know the guns are not shot in the collection so as a result the care is a little bit different than if you were trying to maintain something for use we do have a full scale conservation lab here which is really nice and they go through and they do they dust and they kind of keep an eye on the guns when the guns are on display they're kept at about 25 foot candles and then if there's like velvet or you know paper or anything in the case it comes way way down that's why a lot of people can I swear yes okay a lot of people [ __ ] about you know the fact that there are low light levels in museums if there's a reason for that and there's a you know kind of guides on you know what keeps everything good and so we do about twenty five foot candles for guns and for like papers normally five to ten and that's why sometimes the lighting is really low in some of the cases and for that that's basically what we do and if we need to kind of basically clean them we use ethanol for the metal and we actually use a q-tip it's very kind of precise and we use ethanol to clean off the surface and we use micro crystal and wax to kind of you know close it all up and then on the wood they actually spit on it imagine I'm sure just was gonna get a bunch of jokes but that is what we do I mean in your saliva and so you can use your saliva to break down a lot of the technical term the guck on the firearm and then you use micro crystal and max phone as well know if there's rust problems and different things we take it down to the conservation lab and they work on it but that's basically what we do periodically we'll use gun oil especially we're like taking apart using that like and working the actions on it we want to make sure it's not dried out but you have the most part that's about it if you're not actually shooting them it's not like they're gonna get dirty exactly although when the guns came in that was the standard of practice of all wd-40 and like some gun oil and so we're working right now on kind of identifying some of those guns that need to be cleaned out so that they're not kind of decaying over time alright next question is from David says other than visiting other than visiting donations and telling people about museums what can the average person do to better support our local and national museums oh gosh um a lot so I mentioned that there's really a Durkin scholarship in the US and there's not really a lot of people studying it so one way is you could just actually start studying the subject matter and kind of putting pressure on you know the museum's to really understand the subject matter but the other thing that I try to get a lot of exposure for that people don't know and I'm actually working on this right now is the fact that museums that are non-government entities in the US are bound by gun laws so we have issues we can't take an unregistered assay a lot of people think we can we cannot do it we can't take post 86 machine guns because of the Hughes amendment and so one thing I would do to support museums it's just raising awareness for that because no one really knows that that's a thing I mean I've been working with it and I've been talking about it and hopefully we'll see some things change but in the UK they do have a license where museums if you're granted a license you can collect whatever you want and we're losing a lot of our history because we don't have this amnesty for museums in the u.s. that are non-government and so for me if I was gonna pick one thing that you could do it would need to talk about that and let people know that your legislators know that that's a real problem that and it's a real melon part as an issue and that's one of the things I mean I've spoken at Aspen Institute which is a liberal think tank about it and even they were like yeah this is kind of weird because if you don't like guns and you don't want to see them on the street where better to put them in a museum and if you love guns want to preserve the history you don't want to see if you destroy and loss because people can't collect it and so that would be the one thing if I could choose to help museums histories awareness that museums really need to get some kind of amnesty in the country for collecting firearms to preserve our history okay probably know where you got that question was going like Wayne Oh Wayne says should be wear cotton or nitrile gloves when handling firearms so Danny my assistant curator is over there and he can't hear us he wears cotton but I let him work on Donald's fine a lot of you work on me and it's a just some excited it's a personal preference but there are issues with cotton I were nitrile which is why everyone makes fun of me on the internet for like my weird like purple gloves and stuff and people like make fun of me when I like hold like a Thompson but the glue itself is a really important thing and a lot of people so we got mad the on recoil because they were like why are you wearing gloves you can just wipe it down that doesn't actually work because when you wipe it down you actually just spread it out I actually talked to her conservator about that you ended up spreading it all around but with the cotton gloves you can especially you're working with something that's got fine inlay your glut can get caught on something on the firearm really any object and it can lift that and the other thing with cotton is all cotton give me a bracelet I people don't realize that I mean we use it for a lot of our cleaning but you do have to be careful it's it's minimally abrasive but it can be but you also can sweat through so I get a lot of guys they're like why don't like wearing nitrile because my hands get really sweaty them look exactly because that's sweating through the gloves and you're working for a long period of time you know you might want to switch to something nitrile so it's not sweating into the artifact itself and that's why I wear nitrile but I mean if you're doing a photo op or your jury kind of minimal stuff cotton was fine but a lot of the museum profession is moving away from it don't know people are gonna ask why I don't wear gloves yeah I wear gloves when the institution I'm working with requires pretty much all accredited yes yeah what was kind of interesting to me one of the auction houses no bring this up because I know people are gonna ask about the auction houses don't ya and I've asked them before like is there a reason why not and the difference that they have is they go through a tremendous volume of fire yeah because you know they're they're cycling through quickly it you know gun comes in take it to to one of the guys figure out what it is write it up describe it put it back on the shelf get the next one and what they found is with and I think it was particularly talking loves they were more likely to drop a fire yes that is another thing we've got yeah very often but considering how little they handle each individual gun and the fact that it's not going into case where it's gonna be stored it's gonna get sold to someone who's probably gonna shoot it and yes they found it was actually more more likely to cause problems if they wear gloves all the time yeah the occasional slip and drop together well and there are certain things in museums where they won't work gloves at all because of that you know so the the risk to the object is is greater and you know the other thing about some of that stuff is the fact that if it's private use I'm not going you judge someone for doing what they want with what they own but with the kind of the glove world if you don't have gloves and you absolutely have to pick something up though the stock is your best bet I have seen guns and museum collections that will remain nameless and others that have fingerprints on the metal and make people want something too big of a deal and I've watched it if you don't take care of it and we never really doesn't start to show up over time but if you if you have to and you're working with no kind of a museum collection and you normally wear gloves the stock is better and you can also do a test to see how acidic your hands are people have different like acid levels in their hands and so there's like a chest and I'm trying to think it looks like on copper where you put your hands on it and then you wrap it and like aluminum foil and you just leave it I think it's copper I'll double-check your knowledge you know it's not a lot of times I've done it and then you just kind of check to see how you know sharp your your fingerprints are on there and so some people look like hands I can do it better and then others can't ya know Keegan says what direction do you see firearms museums going are they as strong as ever where do you see the whole the industry as a whole going well I think it's really DJ's own and what the mission of the institution is and what their audience is our first museum stronger than ever I'd like to think so because we just opened a museum we just reopened our museum when I would like to see more from firearms museum so I've done a lot of research on kind of the evolution of collecting and Firearms museums and typically firearms museums have a lot of connected art museums and the unifier net are is the collecting kind of nature of a lot of these things got started and a lot of gun museums are by the collector for the collector which is great if you're a collector and if you know what you're looking at which is how they're when Cody fires in was and you know people like us we can go on go oh yeah that makes a connection here and I understand the history but if you have a museum in a large gun collection where you get a large audience that doesn't know about guns especially with kind of the tumultuous nature of today's kind of climate education is such an important role that we can have and eating people about firearms these experiments EFT kind of historical context and so we really pushed our museum to one these you're the collector you know we've got over 10,000 artifacts on just like in the new museum but it's we also be huge emphasis on the history component of it and contextualizing it for people so people can see you know how guns have been used because so often in today's culture a lot of people you're not around guns who think guns are kind of like over here and again people are over here and it's separate from American society but in reality for 800 years farms have been integral to understanding pretty much all of society and people just don't see that and so if you have a museum that has like the opportunity to reach an audience that's non gun I really think we need to find ways to kind of bring people under the fold of understanding how they're used in our museum because we're non-political we you know it's not my job to tell you what to think it's my job to give you enough information that you can make informed decisions and hopefully have a productive dialogue that's such as streaming out one another and so I would like to see that more with my herbs museums is pushing that kind of educational component for an audience that may not be traditional okay yeah next up we have Dena does actually do in any anecdotes pertaining to being a female curator of a museum perhaps some reactions by hitting the big tools that weren't expecting you to be the curator I never didn't happen last time we did a video so yeah I think less gender more age so I took over the museum I was 24 23 we're just like way too young like I'm even gonna admit that I mean I had a master's degree I am really grateful the museum gave me a chance and the number one way that I was successful was because I never pretended to know what I didn't know and I would just go in and be like I don't understand what this is tell me what how this works but your our we do get some weird circumstance it's the best one I have recently I was up in the museum we just opened we still only two galleries open and I was waiting for someone so I sat down on the bed checked by a case in our hallway and this young guy is pushing this really older gentleman in a wheelchair he's got like a beanie on and a blank and I mean we're talking like really really elderly and they go up to our cases in a 4-0 number one 1887 in it and he starts by the older gentleman starts talking about the gun and was I in identifying what it was and I just you know shiny and I was like oh it's Henry Ford's as well then he gave it to Harvey Firestone and the young guy turned around and he was like oh gee do you work here and I was like yeah yeah I run the museum and and so they've gotta spend a few more seconds and then the older guy comes and like this is exactly how he said it and it was just it made my freaking day he goes he's the dirt away from me okay and he goes turned me around I want to see the woman I was like oh my god man it was so good and then at the end of it he came up to me I was strolling the galleries and he was like no older job you've done an amazing job the other one that my curatorial assistant my assistant curator really liked the both named Dan for simplicity sake you did that deliberately yep that's all my hires if your name's Dan you might be able to have a job here but so the best is in my curatorial assistant Debra Lee is a retired law enforcement and he looks like who you would think would be a gun chemistry and and Danny they're both in the outer office and I'm kind of hidden back away either my bodyguards from and so like a lot of times I won't come out of my office sometimes people are talking and all that kind of look man out one day some guy came in and asked a question about a super gross revolver and you know it's random ask question and they happened to know I'm not like I don't always just randomly know the answers to questions but this day I knew who he was I'm not a Walsh Evolver and so I was like I came out and Dan was like about to like look it up and I was like I think you're talking about the wall she'll offer and he was like and like the with air my their favorite thing dan the Dan's favorite thing is to watch cuz like I'll say something and then they'll start like they don't and they're like looking at me down and then like looking at me and it takes about a minute than they ultimately are having the conversation with me but there's been some good ones over the years but that's kind of a that's free standard when I start answering a question and they're usually talking to my gmail employees first but honestly people are pretty receptive to it once they get to know me you see me online or on TV and stuff and you're like what the hell does she know but if you actually have a conversation with me about crime find out pretty quickly that I do know what I'm talking about and they do people are pretty respond perceptive do it so no yeah wonderful I'm glad you don't have a worse experience with it yeah I really don't my age like I said was really one of us I looked 12 and I was running the museum and that's not great the renovation luckily has HP but yeah it's really been relatively positive good Dave plays says how do you feel about the shoe first preserved debate on historical firearms especially rare pieces this issue has been raised by some other video channels like mark for me and Bo gums may should these guns be preserved or should people shoot them to better understand history if you're a private owner of a rare firearm it's the responsible thing to do oh I don't do with their lives and I don't know what these channels have talked about so my gonna start like a real scandal oh so it really - it depends on what you want to do I mean obviously if the kind of save and it's yours and that's your prerogative I'm not gonna tell you to shoot it or to not shoot it I think it is really important to learn how to shoot if you're gonna know about firearms history whether it is a reproduction piece or a historic piece that's capable of doing it you know they're so technical and you know I can talk until I'm doing the face about how we live work so I'm totally you fire one you know we really don't really actually understand it's actually really well it's really a climactic when you shoot it but it's really awesome yeah and I status shoot a hand cannon like a few months ago Madlock so I recommend like you're really trying to understand and getting me up for tweeny just shoot something because it really does kind of put in perspective now if I'm being like academic Ashley else you know there's a lot of conversation about well you can't really know the circumstance of what people went through to fully you know understand it but it really does help you and it helps you understand it and so I mean our collection like I said we don't shoot our collection because we're accredited and really if you're trying to preserve something forever I mean it does decay over time and so you have to be kind of selective in it depending on what you want for it but there is something in the museum world that we are exploring which I touched on but I'll explain exactly what I can accession something into a non-permanent collection so we've a lot of stuff and do I really need another model 70 maybe debate yeah well it's a cool one but like do we really need another one that's really not like us or significant but maybe I need it for the shooting collection and so he would session is a non permanent collection item you can shoot it and so I would like to see Cody get a functional firearms collection that's not you know some theater Rosa box 95 but it'll be you know a 95 but it's you know exactly you know kind of what that's about and I would like to see us move kind of that direction because I do think it's a very valuable thing with histories of technology but reversible stuff do you man well you know this is something that I have to balance you know especially some of these some of the auction houses that I go to where I'm able to shoot stuff yeah the their machine gun specialist and I have conversations about you know this gun would be really cool to shoot but it's rare maybe it's fragile yeah there are no parts for him so or you know curious one that maybe it's also Rick but there we know where there are extra parts available yeah if the extractor Braves yeah we can get a new one well see and now in the museum world the kind of difference of that it's very interesting from the that's the difference in the collector world is that like we can't just replace the part okay that doesn't you know it's not the object of succession it came into the collection and so you really have to kind of weigh that in our world I'm not a collector we have a w AR the collection and it's one of the serial number servers everything's right except for one thing on it and I know the guy that has our number and he's got you know though in the you know you do an easy swap and then we have a perfect serialized you know gun but that's not a museum work the museum's work because it has to be as it came in we need to get that gun to and then we could do that but yeah it's just it's a weird museum world yeah that's an unfortunate hiccup yeah I know they're a collector I know collectors I have to send a text message really quick cuz I just notice that the lights went out I didn't notice that yeah is that a motion sensor thing yes we are still working out the kinks and so well she's doing I know some some private collectors who just don't shoot any of their collection guns and I know some who shoot everything they have almost as a like a specific matter of pride like I won't buy a gun and not shoot it and I think maybe the far extremes if they're done simply for the sake of you know matching that rule like if you shoot it you don't really want to shoot it look well I shot everything else so I have to shoot this yeah maybe that's not the greatest plan but there's nothing wrong with collecting guns and not shooting them and there's absolutely nothing wrong with collecting guns and shooting you if you do shoot them I think it's incumbent upon a collector to take proper care of them to at least exercise some basic judgement in am I gonna feed this thing craptastic surplus ammo that everybody knows is bad and potentially blow it up because I know of some examples where that happened visitors aren't just like hanging out with our good sorry my job is never done this is true yeah well we've done at lunch when you get to go on vacation I'm sure they will not pester you with emails they're not their big investment emails and I will look like one hour every day can't stop it alright david says some car museums will occasionally display a replica clearly identified as a replica of an otherwise unobtainable car do you think that's appropriate for firearms to let people see something they would have otherwise never see I do I do I mean if you don't have access to the real thing and that goes back to what I was just talking about about like what we can and can't collect there's three conflicts that we can interpret because we can't get post 86 machine guns and so in those respects until I can figure out a way to pass legislation having a non-functioning replica at least is better than nothing and so yeah I support that okay yeah we were just talking about that at the conference your some use of 3d printers yeah that would be great G says what firearms platform evolutionary process of design change is best documented in the collection here hmm a lot of them that's documented probably just the history of Winchester I mean I know it's not an evolutionary process but I mean we've got snap dances and Nicolaes and your true flair locks and like we've got the general evolution of firearms like completely represented in the collection but in terms of a comprehensive look at the evolution of a company and things that they made I mean the early early lever actions actually just walk my way around that early lever actions and I mean we've got the hunt volitional which is you know the first and the only we think they think we have the only one which is the great great one more great probably grandfather at the Winchester and the the thing that has that is the tubular magazine which is a second Chukyo magazine patent take it out of the US you missed it by six months being the first and then beyond that we have several iterations of the Jennings which took the hunt and also has a couple of other components and then the Smith Jennings as Horace Smith worked on and then we've got a Smith & Wesson volcanic and we have New Haven volcanic and then you know we go into the Winchester and we've got a pretty comprehensive collection of the Henry's before it became Winchester and a lot of prototypes that led up to the gun that becomes the first real Sherwood juster there were just released in 66 and so in terms of that early evolution it's pretty spot-on and when we have things that people I have no idea they even tried to make and a lot of that comes from the fact that well like one of the core elements that Museum is the Winchester collection yes and the one thing though about that is the fact that because in the widgets or collection yes we have a comprehensive register collection doesn't mean that Winchester didn't give us other things and so most of our encyclopedic nature of our collection came from register across those or longbows our early ignition systems I mean those are all but a hand cannon is all from which is your collection because they were collecting historic guns as well as live yeah cool michael says how much interaction is there between other museums with firearms collections for example the National over to museum or the National museum is their collaboration tune the organization's on specific projects or you guys all kind of keep to yourselves um so the symposium that we created it really started to unify that conversation I've always spoken and met with different museums so when we were planning the Cody fire of cesium I mean I used to do sit when I was at this Missoni in the NRA museum would come and I've been to the Autry and I penned of the World War two and I traveled to see the collections and also to make connections for loans Art Institute the Met but really we work talking and about five or six years ago we did we were all invited to do a roundtable at the Aspen Institute on guns and museums and we realized that was the first time we'd ever been gathered together and in one place know that a conference is the world spread out you know and so when we were finished with the roundtable we were like man we gotta keep this conversation going which is what caused us to make the arsenals of history symposium series and so now we are really all talking to each other and if you are Lucy oh that's all part of it you should come because we do I mean we got Colonial Williamsburg the Matt mostly museums I just mentioned we've got the wrong armor he's got the touch National Military Museum we have all these museums now so that we can connect and you know kind of creating the relationship so that we can have an inter connectivity to our collections and one of the other conversations are you know now how do we connect them online as well so if someone's doing research they know okay it's not here but it could be here yeah yeah I got the blade icon fine yes they did yeah I was like having a good mild panic attack the whole time being like I should go turn the sod but think you've got dance I got dance to take yes multiple dance Tyler says hey Ian and Ashley as a fellow museum professional I'd like to know where to find the most challenging aspect of curating and managing such a large collection of higher force well I'm glad you asked I want to write an article about the pitfalls and cyclopia courtships it's great to have a culture in the sex I'm not you know denouncing that by any stretch of the imagination but I can't wait you have one curator which is me I know a little bit about a lot so I can give you the evolutions there are some things I could talk about like single action safeties like I can bore you to tears talking about the kind of history fasiqun active safety as it pertains to the Colt single-action but you know there's things like that that I know about but really my job is to know the entire evolution of firearms history my job is not to get down on the weeds and specialize in one particular thing I couldn't do my job if that were the thing and so because of that there's a lot of misinformation in our catalog records and museums sometimes get a really bad rap for that like the attentionally are being like you know they do not know what we're talking about so we do the best we can but when you have such a heart like a big collection it can be over to her they identify everything know what's special or rare which is why we bring people like you and brought on the curator of Colonial Williamsburg again we're now you know actively bringing in specialists from the different areas the people like can specialize so they can really tell us more about our collection so that we can better interpret it but that's the real pitfall it's just there's no way to know everything and so a lot of people get really mad mad at us because we don't know something really obscure in our collection or realese know a little bit but we can't get down the weeds with it because it's not our job to know all of that and it wouldn't be possible it's just not enough there's a lot of time in the day one of the presentations we had in the symposium here just yesterday was from another major firearms collection Kuban you know thousands of guns and they were looking at hey we inherited this really kind of awful catalogue you know this is originally handwritten and when they transcribed it on the computer system like seven tons I didn't get on and we have this overall goal if we want to bring the whole catalog we won't be able to digitize that bring it up to a minimum standard of completeness and accuracy and we can do with our staff they were saying we can do X number of Records per year and we have y number of guns in the collection and it's a very simple calculation we'll have brought the whole thing up to minimum standard in I think it was 89 years the dependent that's the pitbull a huge collection I think I think that's something that private collectors run into also yeah that is true you get people who are like I'm always interested in getting the next thing and adding this other thing to my collection and then but you don't if you do that you don't have time to truly dig into and appreciate each other item you'll find something and you'll ask them about I bought that like 15 years ago I know I like that exactly so the more you have the less time you have to put into any individual subject Joshua says I've noticed in my own research that many museums forsake their archival document collection often not making it available to researchers are not even knowing what they have that's why you can touch up a couple of so you don't have to or case I have particularly noticed with military museums where that often times at least for myself documents are the most illuminating part of the collection is this something you've noticed in the music field uh yes no yes yes very much so the old Gerty Farish museum so I do want to point out we have a full-scale research library it handles all the archival material so we very much take care of that archival material but there haven't asked curators of the Cody when I took over where I found like archival material in my office because they if it wasn't a gun it wasn't an object and so that was forsaking a lot and I've cleaned out my office and moved everything down but there was kind of a mindset for a long time where like if it wasn't a gun it didn't you know matter and it's that's so not true and so I'm grateful that we have a full-scale research library analogist people email me try to give me papers and I'm like McCracken McCracken research library because we do and have the you know a lot of original design drawings with the original records which is tomorrow and he'll see Smith and now it's look at and you know that's a huge part of understanding history and there was for example there's a book that just came out their up kasev Dunbar did on winchester model 1895 and we have on loan from Sagamore Hill including Crockett one of Theodore Roosevelt's 95s than four or five paycheck on African safari and they found while they were here the actual archival records had said that it went out with Theodore Roosevelt and we didn't even know but we didn't know they found it because they were doing research on it and so you do sometimes get those really special jumps that help round out your provenance you can't just by getting a gun and you know someone's like my Pappy you know said that Buffalo Bill gave it to be back in the day I mean that's not helpful but paperwork is what helps really make them out to expression so clearly your archival material is available for people that yes you can schedule meetings and you they're very accommodating and even go into that research and now we're sitting in the firearms research and conference room and the new Kirti Firearms Museum so if you schedule way in advance you can come and we can actually take the guns off display you know out of the vaults and you can do research here on the firearms you can go over and do archival research as well how common is that sort of not necessarily gun access but the document access and other museums most museums have an archive nowadays yeah but do they let people can do it the ones that I've been around but I've worked with big museums they usually do schedule employments but smaller museums it just depends on their staffing abilities okay big things staffing abilities yeah Paul I've got one that may be a bit of a hardball a local general history museum here did an inventory check earlier and notice that something like two hundred and fifty items from blades to a fully functional World War two heavy machine gun we're missing an estimated value of about a hundred thousand euros how does the inventory system work at Cody how often our guns and storage checked if not for functionality them for actual presence he did not tell me a name of the music I don't even although it sounds like it's in Europe because it was a hundred thousand euros yeah there's a lot of Europe and a lot of museums a lot of museums in Europe so there we go yeah how do you like how do you know if someone liked doing something out of the hole well there's been lots of rumors over the years about people stealing stuff out Cody firemen's Museum vaults like there have been investigations that didn't happen and what we do now we actually meeting up to the creeper of caesium renovation we did a hands-on full skeleton inventory we would do inventories that'll be a lot of kinda like spot checking and when we did that inventory we Barker's everything so now every object in the museum has a and we track it through bar coding systems and you seen you've seen up in the museum there are barcodes on all of our labels as well so that the barcodes never leave the object because we don't wanna have the paint jacks because people yell at us when we obtain tags and it's real tacky looking and everybody always asks you know when you're sewing those goats know it's a wheeze of our coding system and that way you know if it gets moved you scan it you know for where it was to where it's going and so it's a much easier way of keeping track of where everything is okay yeah and because we have all of our you know we better have felt like better SOT you've got all of our licensing we've gotta be you're like just everything has to be super super to the T you regulated so we are using that system and so far so good on it I recommend a bar coding system for a lot of museums if you can do it for sure yeah let's you me basically associate your item with your catalog very easily - yeah and it allows to the possibility for a public interviews with it as well right yeah alrighty Alan says what legal complications are there for firearms you just mentioned having an SOT are there any exhibits or pieces you'd like to showcase but can't because of legal interference yes so I talked about but yeah I mean we we are rebelling by gun laws and so the big ones right now are is unregistered in a thing and Hughes amendment stuff and we do have a dealer's license and so I know that there's a way with the manufacturers license to have someone else produce the machine guns for the you know there is a like a way but it's not the stuffing was actually historic and that's limiting and there and I know some people probably even get a letter we can't we have tried a lot of letter the wording in the law letter we've talked to the ATF and our policy with the fire museum is we go by what the law and the paperwork actually says not what someone tells us is ok because that agent may not either you know in two years they might not be as friendly and so we go by whenever it actually says and we have that with the ATF about that and they the letter because we're not demonstrating for sale it's doesn't apply what it's not technically yeah and so there's a lot of stuff about form gems you want for attending something to amusing which is a for a long time was a weirdly acceptable way was never really a fully legal way for museums to have those and so there was a big legal limitations what we're working on is hopefully to get a waiver for museums in the u.s. basically asking for the same thing that like a government museum would have which is the ability to collect those things so that we're not losing our history but then there's other things that come into play like not all museums that collect firearms have firearms licenses and so you know I'm kind of curious I have a look too much indra but like if the universal background check goes into you know existence will that affect certain museums with getting collections like will they need to kind of process that and so there's a lot of discussions and so when we write something we want to make sure that it you know gets us the things that we haven't been able to get but also exempts us from future things so that there's not a limitation you know a hundred years ago adam says what do you think is the best way for a college student studying history to approach scholarly research on historical firearms in a modern academic world that is generally hostile to firearms in general you would know it's not easy i mean i talked about the fact earlier on that you really can't get a degree for saying in firearms the other real limiting factor is the fact that when you're doing quote unquote but we talked about this yesterday difference between academic and scholarly research academic is a very specific type of research so being an academic historian of a PhD i have a master's degree people call me a historian i I call myself a historian at this point because I published a lot of you know certain journals but academic is what the university system is usually looking for and it gets really difficult when you're in grad school when you take with your first historiography course which historiography has to teach you how to write history its are you if you're trying to focus in firearms there's Nala folks out there that are academically respected by University Press that had peer reviewed and if you're doing that track you've got to do that one book that's been completely denounced by everybody is arming America that one the bank robber thank God for sended and there's a new book on counting of like a mohawk and I don't think too highly of that book and what happens with academic scholarship and the reason it gets really difficult is a lot of times the academic historians that are writing it they don't have a background in the material culture of firearms and so they're looking at like a socio-economic a political history so when they start talking about the way the guns actually functions they're wrong and my question is if you actually knew how the technology operated would it change your conclusions and so I think a lot of the really academic stuff tends to be a little misleading I'm about to review a book so I'll let you know if it's worthwhile is called the the lives of guns and David him mean I'm probably butchering his name gun culture 2.0 if you've never talked to me Alicia he's awesome he's a PhD sociologist he's in it so I'm intrigued to see what the it's a series of essays but that's a real struggle is you have to play the the academic game at the academic books but they're not always that accurate and then when you move into the other side of the research most gun books have been written by collectors researchers and I know you know a publishing company which helps the situation because that's something that like I can look and say I'm confident that that publishing company because I know your research is successful but how do you get that information especially if you know people are self-publishing is this information good is it gum or or folklore which I just heard let me know use that forever now it's it's not easy I'm not trying to deter this person from doing it you just kind of have to you know play the game go through the university system the way I got through it was I actually picked a subject matter and guns that people you know it appeased the university system is actually pretty badass I said even armed feminism and female african-american civil rights activism so I looked at firms counterculture in the 60s and 70s which is Miss radical group of people that you don't traditionally associate with firearms who were arming themselves with cream these really good pamphlets on your firearms basic self-defense and then they had some really like colorful cartoons they go I don't but I you know that was something that they found really interesting in grad school and so I found that kind of like medium but if you're looking at it the one thing I would recommend is finding a advisor and a mentor that is maybe a military historian or someone that's got a background in firearms and then do independent studies that's how I did it um I get a bunch of independent studies with hey the chair of our department I was a military Australian and so I kind of got free rein does anything for you okay yeah I actually wasn't really long answer to I think I might have scared away no it's good to know what you're getting yeah I actually had a minor in history really yeah and the one in depth deep grad level class that I took I ended up doing a paper on armed violent Jewish resistance to the whole that's really interesting a couple of the concentration camps were shut down by violent uprising and never reopened okay moving on Daniel says it seems that what is old is new again Ruger has nearly single-handedly resurrect at the 30 caliber pocket pistol even 38 revolvers are coming back there seems to be a steady resurgence of derringer type to barrel pistols what's one firearms concept you would like to come back or think could make another yeah I would like to see cool prototypes that could have been good that didn't go forward because war is that they're there whatever money circumstances I would like to see like a resurgence in that stuff that could have had a chance but didn't for whatever historical reason get me today a lot of stuff out there that got abandoned that could have been good most of the stuff that gets abandoned gets abandoned for pretty good reviews I think I'm like selfishly just going to purchase we just want perfectly just like a Burton any one manufacturer out there you've got two sales yeah she'll buy one and hope well I guess that's second best option but it would it would not it would meet them mag you know the dumping in an agonal if it's lower smooth yeah so semi-auto birds and light machine rifle which would then not be called that man Leonard says well the obvious museum versus museum collection first private in question you know it belongs in a museum oh you actually say that it's not I would I love it you know John Smith since so long and I sing the meme and I'm like yeah it was right at the beginning I was gonna be a doctor at that point so like I wasn't paying attention perhaps less obviously how do you divide your time how much is spent on fundraising acquisitions dispositions curating arranging exhibits research because you kind of do all of it yes yes well I don't you know really like obviously I think the things should come to a museum if museum is capable of preserving it and interpreting that history but I certainly support you private collecting because there's it's a whole other niche that you guys can do different things that we can't do with the private collections the only thing that I get worried about sometimes is when it goes in the private sector you know just losing it at some point you know and it's easy to lose provenance in history exactly disappear but I mean you can lose that they've gotten a lot better you know the modern museum feel display way more into paper work and keeping that all straight from getting it going but I know that there's been there's some bad blood with the museum field over the years and that's what's caused it to become a lot more efficient and the way that it operates yeah I mean obviously I want to have all of the coolest or guns in my museum but I mean if someone's gonna get their hands on it I'm not gonna you know on that yeah generous okay thank you see James says I had the opportunity to visit the Firearms Museum last August I hope to visit again later when in August what changes can I look forward to did he come when we were clothes introduced new because my assumption would be there be expletives in that question came one hurricane it doesn't sound particularly annoying early August we had the museum open mid-august we closed it so if you came when it was closed everything and if you came if you came before we closed definitely come see it's really different there's color plum in the walls we are ten thousand six hundred seventy five artifacts on display everything is placed within its historical context in terms of actually what you can see the display the case displays basically doubled in size we have a lot more visible storage the pullout rocks you can see both sides its rim the whole museum you can see those upstairs as well as downstairs we've got a gun library down here one of the things I really like is there's not nearly as much stuff I think left in the vaults in the back there's always stuff that can be in there that's like yeah you're still upset that's left is not all that relevant yeah where we have it already on display like yeah so the problem most museums have is we've got space for a hundred guns but we've got 500 so 400 interesting unset and all yeah what you've done with these pull open renounce is you have a very dense store yeah and you go into this basically hallway no visible guns and it's all pullout racks yeah and there's a tremendous like everything of interest in the bubble can go in there yeah so it's not you know you don't have a big interpretive display on it but for the people like me you know we're like oh I want to see every savage 99 that you guys have yep well guess what there's racks of savage 99 yeah but you can actually see yeah so it's this great balance of we've gotten you have interpretive displays for the general public and then you've got but I love this term I just heard this term yeah the gun aquarium downstairs and indigo areas oh absolutely it's it's funny the gun Quarian was coined by Ben Nicholson and I mentioned earlier in the scenario because he's studied a lot of gun museums and the gun query now is just guns in basically a fish tank and what's funny is I think because we've got a lot of cases that are c4 now so you can kind of see through in other galleries you can see both sides click gun I can even see more like an aquarium but I don't think it's a strong Category term as it was when he originally going to it yes because there's context and there's descriptive style and the cool thing about our museum like we're about to do some summative surveys but since we've been open like in Megan so a week ago there were so many more families in here and there people talking because there's these reader rails and out contacts loose videos and these media interactive some hang on interact just for firearm simulators like people are have things that they want to do in the museum that's not necessary like the old museum all we have is the guns which I know sounds like I'm you know discounting the guns but that made a very isolation like an isolationist experience where you were coming and staring at the guns now you've got someone who's interested in the guns staring at the guns that somebody else is pointing something out or pulling out of Iraq or watching the video and then they're talking about it yeah that's cool and you have resisted the temptation to have a giant room with a little box that has one hour yeah I mean as millennial I do sometimes like I like immersive experiences in museums and I get them I don't know I just think what they can do with technology is fascinating and so there are museums that I do support that kind of attitude if that's the mission of the institution and what they're trying to go for it's not what we want to go for it but I mean I enjoy a good like what works your museum doesn't have a ton of stuff on display but that museum is pretty like in terms of oh no you don't like it just said it and that's it you're going but I got but nature to live like the overall experience and for that type of visitor that they get and it was there the number for museum in the world right yeah and I enjoyed the experience but I do I mean we still believe in a museum people come to see with stuff they come to the artifacts and so we balanced context and interactivity with the fact that we displayed so many more guns that we displayed in a museum yeah yep I think it's tremendously rare from you seem to redesign and display more stuff especially more guns than before I was still very very distinctly by my board there will be more display so that was my ass if we did not succeed excellent david says actually if I recall correctly which he does does he already sent this here right now you spend some time at the Smithsonian obviously there's a cultural difference between DC and Cody Wyoming any attitude towards firearms this may come as a shock to you what do you find that this is reflected in the museum patrons or socially when people find out what you do for I was just in DC for a week when I was talking to legislators so they knew who I was when I went in um so the DC thing is really interesting in the culture thing is really interesting you would be surprised because we are you move down 10,000 we get about 3,000 people through the doors every year we do get a lot of people that are from the coasts and around the world that don't have experience with kind of wyoming culture and so i get that fairly often and that's why we built the museum the way we did because they recognized that that was a big audience bush um if people don't know me and they just hear I work with guns every once in a while I get a kind of hostile reaction but to be perfectly honest I don't really get into politics myself I don't judge people and jump down your throat for their opinion regardless and I work a lot I have a really great relationship with the media believe it or not they've been really good because I recognized early on there's a difference between asking a question of ignorance and asking a question to intentionally try to you get shot and I've been able to kind of figure those out over the years and so I've had a really good working relationship with people and you know one of the things that I do is if someone's emotional like it's not worth my time because I'm not gonna you know convince anybody but if someone has a question about like look as your example I was gonna be our interview years and years ago and I was catawba commenting on how we have a blunderbuss that Catherine the gig gave to keep moving the 15 friends as a sign of peace and she just said the interviewer you're friends with her now she said you know that's a little weird a gun for peace and I said and I just took a sucker and I thought well no I mean you have to look at it in the context of the time and that was a pretty common thing and we didn't you know there wasn't the stigma around the fires back then that you know a lot of people have today and so you're looking at it with present ISM and your eyes and your perception of it and judging historical past on that and she went you're right you know it's a taking in that very academic approach a lot of people I didn't I have a lot of friends that don't like guns you know we can have really interesting conversations and one of the things that there's symposium and the association I just found it is that I have people that don't like guns in that Association and they are fighting hard in the university system to get fire history study because even though we don't draw the same conclusions from it they think it's absurd we're not studying it because if you're not studying it how can we feel like we're you know comfortable in our conclusions and the things that we're pushing and so you can draw different conclusions from history that's what history is about a lot of people think it's one opinion and that's it it's not but you know I tend to have a very academic approach to when I talk to people like that and it's pretty puzzle it's just random people you know that you get that don't know you at all the context I don't normally say what I do you don't fit the stereotype yeah no one's gonna look II used to make jokes I've totally I've done curious well when I was a blob I used to like when I go in academic forums I'd be like those and I know I look like a fox news anchor but just like carry with me okay and I said that to the meeting what's wrong with that and I was like oh my god I'm sorry alright one last question yeah this is from Kyle says have you ever had to say no to a donation om so why oh it's one of the least you don't want my grandpappy's Remington 700 it's a pre 64 it's a great one this is the word this is also another thing to talk about cyclopædia collections that kind of socks like this like valise favor bar my job which is my having Danny do it now but no we honestly we turn more stuff away to probably accept at this point you know we've got 7,000 firearms and we're trying to fill holes in the collection and so when we look at something and I took us out of juvenile system curator and you know hopefully put the push that onto my staff now is that if I don't think I'm gonna display it now we to only do things unrestricted because there when you put restrictions on things it's bad for the collection and it makes it very unmanageable on our end but if I don't think it's something that I'm gonna display because I've got twenty others and there's no provenance or something significant I don't take it because I don't think it's fair to that person to have it sitting in a vault and so what I used to do back when me in time and I hope we can start up doing start doing it again what it used to do is if I knew a museum in their area a gun collection that would love to have something like that I tried to put them in touch with that institution or at least up in contact to that institution because it's just to me it doesn't sit right with me to take something just to take it because I don't wanna have a difficult conversation because it's not fair if you know but obviously if they can't you know we have a lot of people who'd like if they're like dying wish to have something here and we do take a state kiss but if I can't if I don't think I'm gonna reasonably be able to display it's not worth that them and it's not worth our time with the processing you don't actually get any benefit you do a bunch of work yeah and it's another museum or another private collector that can't happen exactly no all right well that was quite a lot of questions no I'm sorry for the random intermission where we context me she really is quite busy so thank you very much for taking all the time I think we have more better audio today than we did the god I hope so yeah if you are in Cody Cody is of course the Gateway to Yellowstone National Park there is a smorgasbord of beautiful natural stomach up here to do you know the rodeo and there's a rodeo a daily rodeo yeah this is Wyoming anyway if you're here the Cody Museum is part of the Buffalo Bill Center for the West there are four other museums in the same complex and a research library should yes the mccracken research library they do factory letters for register Marlon Elsie Smith and at some point ethica as well as having just a whole pile of other design drawing yeah respondents some funny correspondence we have this the sour grapes letter browning and Winchester broke up there's great anyway anyways tremendous amount of stuff here if you're in Cody make sure to stop in yes yes we're getting people stare from outside the room so anyway we'll go ahead and wrap this up thank you guys very much for watching thanks to all the patrons who submitted questions you guys are the ones who make it possible we'll be back tomorrow with some more cool gun stuff wait does that mean I have to like paid to be a patreon watch this no no but you don't get to submit a question yes that's that's the special purple hey guys you

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 128,424

Rating: 4.9445853 out of 5

Keywords: history, development, mccollum, forgotten weapons, design, disassembly, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, cody, firearms museum, curator, ashley hlebinsky, cody firearms museum, gun museum, q&a, question, answer, female curator, exhibit, archives, preservation, adademic, scholarly, research, nitrile gloves, preserve, private collection, donation

Id: t0itSN9gkkw

Length: 58min 44sec (3524 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 08 2019

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