Weapons Man

Do you want to study unconventional warfare? You probably do, if you’re like many of the people who visit and comment here. It’s not only a compelling subject for people who once practiced UW, or in the future may be called upon to do so; it’s also a fascinating study in and of itself. It is full of human emotions and heart; of brilliance, buffoonery, skulduggery and treachery in a great mulligatawny that’s never alike in any two nations or regions, and any two historical periods. And it’s just what the doctor ordered if you love history and have become bored and jaded with the overexposure of history’s great decisions and inflection-point battles.

The forty-something woman in the picture on the right is 25-year-old Amber Campbell. This is your face on drugs.

We recounted, based in part on news stories and in part on insider tips, the strange tale of what we called the Pennsylvania State Police’s Pistol OCD. If you feel the need to catch up, if you don’t there’s a one-line tl;dr at the end:

We’re away from home, but we’re not. No, we’re not all zen-via-Jackie-Chan. There’s nothing symbolic or paradoxical about that at all, because the thing is, we’re at the folks’ home.

Aging parents are Just One Of Those Things™. Everybody our age has got ‘em, and knows the delight you feel when someone has such a good day, she forgets she’s beaten down by endless rounds of dialysis and having to suck generated oxygen through mostly-dead lungs.

Everyone our age has got ‘em, and knows the heartache of seeing someone who was strong as Kong getting his ass kicked by a pill-bottle cap.

It’s good just to help, it turns out. It does a soul good. And God knows they were there through the kids’ diseases, dead pets, ER visits, romantic rejections, romantic successes (more costly in the long run), professional triumphs and tragedies, and personal ones.

God knows there’s a debt owing.

It is meet that it be paid.

Just one of those things, you know.

As we saw over the last couple of days, it’s possible for a very brief period of very high intensity firing to drive a weapon to catastrophic failure. The managers of US small arms programs have identified two additional failure modes that are exacerbated by high rates of fire (and therefore, high temperatures: bolt failures and barrel failures).

Remember the old Donovan song? Eh, unless you’re like us, old enough to remember the introduction of that new “dirt” stuff, maybe you don’t. The trippy 60s songwriter sang the very zen line:

In the enormous1 part one of the series, we reacted to a brain-dead article published in The Atlantic by a retired Major General, who has, since his retirement 20+ years ago, been a lobbyist for defense firms and TV talking head. (Before he got his stars he was an artillery officer). We may have more to say about our brain-dead GO in a subsequent post, but we think we raised some good points about his article. We weren’t the only ones. He also ticked off Nathaniel Fitch at The Firearm Blog, and we heard, also the guys at Loose Rounds (you know, the ones that fire M4s at 1000 yards and make the steel ring? Those guys?), and no doubt there are other places in the gunosphere flaying him. The point of today’s increment is not to make the rubble of the General’s small-arms expertise do a dead-cat-under-155-battery-closed-sheaf-fire-for-effect bounce, but to discuss the technical limits of a shoulder weapon in sustained automatic fire.

Current postal inspector’s badge.

This kind of gun control, anyway:

The Big Lie principle, as elaborated by Hitler and Goebbels, is that if you tell a small lie, you’ll be caught on it, but if you tell a really big, even outrageous whopper, people will tend to believe it. It’s an insight into human psychology which helps explain how those two second-stringers wound up seizing the levers of the most advanced nation in 20th Century Europe and running it into the ground, to the detriment of scores of millions worldwide. But right now, it’s making the rounds in our little world, as hired shills for foreign manufacturers lie about one battle to pad their own paychecks. This lie is so bold and blatant that many have come to accept it as true, even though official documents tell another story.

Gun cake! From CakeCentral.com.

This is a screencap of a real tweet (we dunno how to embed the actual tweet) from the network once known as the History Channel.

Before law enforcement went to all auto pistols in the 80s and 90s, there was a last flowering of .357 revolvers. The sweet spot seemed to be a 3″ or so barrel on a stainless six-shooter from one of the big manufacturers. Many of these were acquired by the government, but since the Clinton Administration the Feds have preferred to dispose of them by destruction rather than sale. These are examples of the 20th Century law enforcement revolver at its highest level of evolution.

Every once in a while you stumble over something where, although the execution is ragged, the concept is so staggeringly brilliant that you’d tolerate even “slipshod,” and “ragged” is positively welcome. Such a concept is The Art of Battle.com, which delivers informative animated presentations that let you visualize famous battles in motion. “It’s like a museum, except not boring,” they claim.

From a Weatherby ad:

We believe but are not certain this mugshot is the suspect, Kenneth A. Hoang, from a previous arrest.

You know you’re on target when you start taking flak from Britain’s low-class tabloids, like the Daily Mail. When you’re driving even the oiks’ own oikophobia to a Nigel-Tufnel-esque 11, you’re doing something right. And the Scrooges at the Mail are alarmed that we give one another guns for Christmas over here. “What, are there no prisons?” the editor asks. “Are the workhouses closed?”

We saw this very cool .22 rifle on Reddit and Imgur — but the story behind the rifle was even more interesting, to us, because it’s a tale of human adaptation to that most inhuman of human adaptations, bureaucracy.

One of the things that many builders find daunting about the idea of manufacturing firearms completely from scratch, is manufacturing a rifled barrel. There are two tough nuts to crack with barrel making. The first is deep hole drilling, which is still called in industry “gun drilling,” because the technology of deep hole drilling, which today has many industrial applications, was initially developed for making gun barrels. Gun drilling will be dealt with separately; today, we’re going to talk about rifling a drilled (and, usually, reamed to precise size) barrel blank.