Well at least we all agree that a lunchbox special is a " Stolen gun"! And before we suggest that "ANY"collector on this site is in possession of a "Stolen Gun" we should have at least " SOME" evidence! Or that term is grossly inaccurate and insulting!!
When we think of the obvious mentality of " The Thief" the last thing they want to do is get caught with the goods? Or leave a trail of their criminal activity!! A serial numbered gun generally speaking is an accountable gun! That's why thieves tend to file off numbers when actually stolen from the public. When a Theif steals in "the factory" they are opportunists but still do not want to get caught. Unfinished and unnumbered parts are a safer bet for the thief I would imagine. Especially since Roy Jinks and the historical department "CLEARLY" prove that Smith & Wesson kept excellent records!
Unnumbered parts have very likely not been documented by the factory. A serial numbered gun is way further down the line I would think and "has been"documented! When we perform an inventory in house and find serial numbers missing we would suspect theives wouldnt we? Contractors or not, we are now on the lookout for them! Maybe have a meeting with the troops and investigate? I don't know of any company at least back then that would tolerate theives!!
It may be grossly insulting to you, but for me it's just a part of the gun's history. And in context, it's a fascinating history that we'd do well not to judge so quickly.
Smith & Wesson kept records like most other companies, but these records were in service of managing the corporation's day-to-day needs and not proving historical debates a century and a half later. And historical records are never "proof" of anything; people lie all the time and historical records bear witness to that. Just because something is in the books doesn't mean that it's "legit," and just because something isn't in the books doesn't mean that it was the spoils of crime. Roy would be the first person to say that the records are sometimes confusing and cryptic and sometimes flat out missing, and that's just the way it is. It made sense to someone back in the day, but since we weren't there we're not in a position to judge.
(For a good example of this, spend some time comparing peoples' entries in the census records. People lie about their age, birthplace, marital status, etc. It's a fascinating side-study of human behavior, and a reminder to be careful about taking written records as the gospel.)
A lot of this record keeping was also in its infancy. Heck, mass-production was still in its infancy when Smith & Wesson started their operation, as was the concept of modern management practices (with professionally managed departments). Accounting was haphazard and the idea of knowing the exact cost of a particular part would have been more of a guessing game than the scientific process that it is now. Just as they did then, we work now with the scraps of information that we can gather, but we don't have a God's eye view of the factory floor back then to know exactly what was going on. And let's not delude ourselves into projecting some sort of puritanical fantasy on this: petty theft was as prevalent then as it is now, and in some ways was probably a lot easier to get away with.
(If you don't believe me, look at how many companies willingly violated the Rollin White patent, and the thousands of other patents in force at this time.)
The "putting out" system of yore was very different than we understand contract work to be today. Contractors then were sometimes charged for "waste" (parts that didn't pass inspection), and some of these folks may have felt that they were well within their moral compass to take those parts. Others, of course, may have had no scruples about just helping themselves. And I'm sure that there were more than a few people who were eager to gather up the factory's waste and try to make something out of it. In any case, these people had their own stories, and we're doing a fool's errand if we pass judgement on them now.
My point is that there's a lot of shades of grey in this. "Lunchbox special" is a bit of a catch-all term for something that was assembled outside of the factory's regular production run, and outside of the usual R&D prototyping, and outside of any "special order" process that the factory had in place. There may be an exotic story behind it (a great conspiracy to ship parts overseas), or it may just be the case that someone collected rejected parts and would occasionally put a gun together at home. I don't see the term as derisive and I'm sorry if you took umbrage to that; in my opinion it's as educated a guess as we can make right now, until we get more information that suggests otherwise.
Mike
