This is My Rifle, This is My Gun; One is for Fighting…

This is my gun…

The other is apparently for concealing illegal flasks of booze.

The mind boggles at the idea that there was a decade in this country when it was considered perfectly reasonable to be openly lugging around a firearm…which therefore made it the perfect place to stash illegal alcohol or…say…those cigarettes that  get so rumpled in their cardboard box.

“People had learned to cope with [Prohibition],” PG Wodehouse and Gus Bolton write in Bring on the Girls, “at least to the extent of having their liquor analyzed or, in an emergency, of pouring some into a saucer in a darkened room, setting fire to it, and, if it burned with a reddish flame, changing their bootlegger.”

Those colors didn’t come from bathtub gin. They were because the government took otherwise safe alcohol and doctored it with formaldehyde and wood alcohol before it went on sale. The resulting spirits were not intended to be consumed, of course, until a proper bootlegger had cleaned them up again.

Thank goodness the US learned its lesson and never carried that practice forward to…say…the modern era.