Weapons Man

Ah, the nonstop pageant of human bloody-mindedness, in all its dim rage and subsentient fury. We give you Bridget Campbell, of Corpus Christi, Texas, and her boyfriend, who apparently blew the (rent?) money on a gun, and kind of set her off. Well, not “kind of.”

Cartoon courtesy toonpool.com.

Some weeks, we’re hard up for a Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week. Not this week. We have to choose one from about five of them! Tech stuff, skills stuff, historical stuff, it’s all good. Maybe we’ll queue them up for the next five weeks and go on a drinking binge or something!

By now, everybody’s heard about Nik Wallenda’s daring feat. No, not the high-wire stuff — that’s the family business, and they’re all pros. You realize he actually went to Chicago? That’s some iron testicles there, folks. We’re serious — Second City Cop reports that even the cops are getting rolled these days. Or kneed in the family jewels.

A headline to that effect — actually in the form of a question — at Shotgun News nearly made us throw something. In which ate-up worldview, on which backwards planet, and in which topsy-turvy, mixed-up, tossed-up, never-come-down belief system is the SKS the next Garand? One of them was a US service rifle for almost 40 years (the National Guard went direct from Garands to M-16s), a frontline service rifle for 21-24 of those years (1936-57/60), has combat cred from two victorious wars, and was described by a legendary (if hyperbolic) general as “the greatest battle implement ever devised.” In addition, it dominated High Power and Service Rifle target shooting for decades, too, even after the M14 and M16 replaced it in the services’ rifle racks. Indeed, the article hits most of these M1 high points. Meanwhile, the SKS had a mere flash-in-the-pan period as a frontline service rifle in Russia, and was even the second banana in its one great war (the Vietnam conflict, where the preferred NVA weapon was always the AK).

The needle-dick bug buggerers at the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, formerly, m aand now whining because they’re not getting a lot of Daddy Bloomberg’s allowance money, has discovered RangerUp. And they’re appalled. My god! Veterans (pronounced in the tones of Martha Stewart reacting to dog feces on the rug) are joking (pronounced as if humor causes them physical pain) about PTSD! (pronounced as if the proper response to an ailment is to lock the sufferer in the attic and speak his name nevermore).

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know there’s an election in the US on Tuesday. It doesn’t affect the President, who has two years to go of his term-limited 2nd Term, but about 1/3 of the Senate is up for re-election, 100% of the House of Representatives, and many State Governors and other state-level jobs.

The principal reason we’re not winning in Iraq and Afghanistan: we’re not really trying. We have other priorities. And by “we,” we (meaning WeaponsMan.com) mean them (Chuck Hagel and the self-satisfied suits in the Pentangle’s E Ring). Don’t take our word for it! Read our examples. 

There’s modular, and there’s crazy modular. Here’s an AR upper with a twist — it contains a plugged, ported barrel, and launches an ordinary 12 oz. soft drink can out to 100 yards. Coming soon from X Products, you can preorder it (as an upper) now with a $20 deposit.

So, the Gunsmithing Lab needs to move a few feet that way, and new fluorescent fixtures have to be installed above their new location. The stuff in the stacks over there is a mixed bag of old DVD cases from a family member’s failed software venture, and boxed-up music CDs from a friend’s failed album project. (We have the master tapes around here somewhere, too).

And about 12′ x 4′ of furring and pegboard needs to go up behind the gunsmithing bench and machine tools to hold “stuff”.

And a new 6′ x 3′ bench is going there where the gunsmithing area was. That’s the bench Van’s recommends for an RV-12 kit construction area. We’ll build it here until just before the components are too big to fit out the bulkhead. Then it moves to a hangar at one of the airfields nearby for final assembly. Duration of project: 2-3 years.

It’s going to be… interesting… maintaining sterility/segregation between the gun works and the plane works. And there’s also some exercise equipment undergoing overhaul (OK, let’s be honest, it’s down here but the overhaul’s been stalled for a year and we have another rower in the gym already).

If you’ve seen the start of the TV series The Walking Dead, you’ve seen the start of 28 Days Later, because the directors and writers of the TV show plagiarized wholesale from this movie. In both, a brief prologue leads to the real start of the movie, where Everyman wakes up alone, naked, in an abandoned hospital, in what appears to be an abandoned city, after a long recovery.

Palmetto State Armory has some very attractively priced Beretta 92s, but there’s a catch — the magazine catch. These are the transitional 92S: the magazine catch is in the classic bottom of the mag position, like a P.38, but it is a Browning/Luger type push button. The pictures tell the story.

What d’you reckon — Sunni or Shia?

We have our doubts as to whether an injection-molded plastic part, even one with brass inserts, will be serviceable as a practical AR-15 lower. Even the manufacturer says so. (Yes, we now you can build a lower out of anything, but even the forged-aluminum-alloy originals wound up benefiting from reinforced pivot pin receiver bosses and a beefier buffer tower). But just for showing off how an AR trigger mechanism works, they’re the cat’s ass!

Not what we had planned for this morning, actually, but frequent commenter Oberndorfer sends a link to an article about what the reporter clearly thinks is a terrifying explosion of gun ownership in Franconia, a bucolic, mostly rural region of Bavaria.

This pretty heat-map of pinks and blues shows legal handgun ownership in today’s (well, 2013’s) Germany. What’s interesting is that you can clearly see the inter-German border that existed during the period from 1949-1992, caused when the Soviet Occupation Zone stood up as the Soviet satellite (slave) state of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and the three Western Allies’ (FR, UK, US) Occupation Zones joined as the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1989 the Soviets lost control of their East German subjects and the long process of German reunification began. Here’s the map, from a feature on the lasting divisions in unified Germany in the newspaper Die Zeit.

Supposedly, they’re going to have the guy who plugged Bin Laden on Fox (warning, Daily Caller link, often has autoplay spam1).

We went to the FBI Most Wanted website for another purpose, and the first man on the list — Frein — had a CAPTURED label on his photo.

Presented with only minimal redactions, the all-hands message: