Weapons Man

You never know what’s going to bubble up out of that leaching field.

An F4F Wildcat doesn’t really look like an A6M2 Zeke. The first has a “fastback” turtledeck behind the cockpit, mid-wing and high tail, squared-off tips of wing and tail, and a barrel fuselage; the second, a “bubble” canopy artfully constructed of flat plexiglass, a low-mounted wing and tail, gracefully rounded surface tips, and a tapered fuselage.

Here we have a few different views of the old ND.  The first comes from Billy Birdzell, via Tom Ricks. We begin with Ricks’s introduction:

Story ledes that get your attention:

Interesting juxtaposition of two op-eds in the Miami Herald, the paper that is, as the old gag goes, “read by people who are running some other country.” In the first, two political prisoners’ wives describe the situation in “Bolivarian” Venezuela:

A couple of days ago we followed a link from The Gun Feed to the Michigan-based gun blog 248 Shooters.com. (We’re guessing 248 is an MI area code? The way the Workshop Eating Plane® will have “603” in its N Number?). Anyway, the article was a short and to the point gear review of an extended or enhanced mag release that is made by a company called ArmaSpec.

The news has been full of the glowering face of ex-Bostonian Usaama Rahim, who the Imam of one of the local Suicide Terrorist Recruiting Centers has described as “shot in the back by a white cop.” Of course, that’s all false, but the apostles of jihad don’t feel like they owe truthful speaking to you, kafr. 

Geez, usually they wait till after you’re married to cash out.

Here’s a publication you may not be aware of: The US Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office’s Operational Environment Watch. In effect, it’s an open-source intel briefing on military developments, intended for the professional officer but available to whomever.

The Quick Kill instinctive shooting method that was once taught in the US Army remains a  useful combat skill. It has been supplanted in the training world by improved sights and a focus on extremely rapid use of sights, but we believe it still has a place in the training and combat world.

We all know what “fan films” look like. Usually, some kids clowning around in Star Wars costumes, with unrealistic characters, stilted dialog, and a complete failure to sell the necessary suspension of disbelief. (Oh, wait: that was Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. But you get the idea). So we’re reluctant to call this a fan film. It’s really good: it’s an earlier Predator visit to Earth — in the time of the Crusades.

Let’s start with a brief description of the crime, from a 2012 obituary of one of the victims:

In Special Forces from 1960 to the mid-1980s, there was a capability called, among other things, “the Magic Rucksack.” (This weapon, and its mission, were prolific producers of slang and nicknames, most of which were as compartmented as the mission itself; it’s unlikely anyone knows them all). It was the Special Atomic Demolition Munition, SADM, a small nuclear fission weapon with a W54 selectable-yield warhead, detonated by timers. It was the smallest of a series of ADMs that specialist Army engineer units trained with.

We’re doubt we reach many urban armed robbers with this blog, so we don’t think there’s much chance they’ll learn from our criticism of one of their number’s TTPs.

After the war, C-47s weren’t celebrated, historical artifacts. They were DC-3s, the world’s workhouse air transport: as legendary as a tractor, as fabled as a boxcar. (Tens of thousands of the plans were built and used by every major combatant in the war — Russia built a licensed version as the Lisunov Li-2, Germany used captured ones, and the Japanese, too, built them under a prewar license). They flew air cargo and passengers until post-9/11 crew door regulations made them uneconomical to update. And pilots often wondered what tales a particular old Douglas could tell, had it the human gifts of memory and speech.

Yes, she did indeed go medieval on the guy. Maybe she intended to go Full Ancient, but had lost her recipe for Greek Fire. So she unleashed the boiling oil instead.

The singing, dancing soul of Kurdish pop has a new song with a weird, weird video.

Ever broken a firing pin? If you’re like us, you have, and then you either ordered a firing pin replacement, or had a gunsmith make one, if there was no factory or used firing pin to be had. Or maybe you just hung the weapon back in its place, your equivalent of the “too hard” file on our desk. This excellent video from the American Gunsmithing Institute (yeah, those guys that want to sell you approximately a million videos for approximately a million dollars) has gunsmith Ken Brooks in show-and-tell mode as he restores a firing pin — in this case, for a Winchester Model 1894 .30-30, but the principles apply whether your broken firing pin is in a Luger or a Lewis gun1.

Let’s start with a caption contest. Best caption in the contest wins… we’ll think of something. We’ll explain what the real caption was after the jump.

This is our first TW3 in a while. It’s not because you suck and we hate you, but because sometimes something gets squeezed out by events, and if something has to go, this is one of the best things to kick to the curb.