Weapons Man

…or does a job on an AK trigger, actually. How do we know it’s Bubba? Well, we’re sure Winston Groom would agree that Bubba is as Bubba does. But also, we have other indicators. For one, the video is from Century Arms; if Bubbadom spreads like Christendom, Century’s Vermont warehouse is its St. Peter’s Basilica. For another, this is what Bubba is building:

Crime is what criminals do. And nothing much deters them, until they get religion (of the bible-thumping or, sometimes, 12-step kind), or they get religion (of the 124-grain, “You believe in Jesus? Say hello to Him” variety). Here’s an example of a target that would deter you or us from crime, but then, we’re not criminals, are we? It didn’t deter one young man, and now he regrets it, somewhat unconvincingly.

Everybody loves a good war movie or TV show, and every nation in the world has wars in its history to draw upon, some controversial and others unifying. For Russians, the controversial wars include the Civil War and the “socialist internationalism” intervention in Afghanistan; the non-controversial ones include the Napoleonic Wars and what Russians know as the Great Patriotic War and we call World War II. In recent years, there’s been a flowering of creativity in the Russian motion picture and TV arts (which have always been strong, even under the dead hand of Communism). This has produced some interesting and rare (in the Anglosphere) war films.

We don’t know how we missed this guy, PrecisionRifleBlog.com, until now. As long time readers know, we have always admired the empirical, side-by-side A-B testing, like the tests that Andrew Tuohy carried out on his own website, Vuurwapen blog, and later at the sadly moribund Lucky Gunner Labs and The Firearm Blog (just search for his name on those sites — if he did it, it’s good. He’s a young man, but he has his stuff in one bag). It reminds us of a scientific experiment. In the same vein, we have enjoyed some of the experiments that Phil Dater PhD did with barrel length, muzzle velocity, and sound pressure levels. Science FTW!

This is Keene’s Bearcat. There are many like it, but this one is Keene’s. Without its Bearcat, Keene is useless. Without Keene, the Bearcat is useless…

We plucked all these photos off of the Regiment’s twisted Twitter feed, which we found thanks to Lee Williams. We start off more serious, and quickly get less serious.

You could not read The American Rifleman or other high-end gun periodicals in the 1950s, 60s, or 70s without noticing that, when the writers were serious about measuring the accuracy of a handgun, they used a machine rest, and often mentioned it by name: the Ransom Rest. A Ransom Rest is a handsome assembly of machined castings, and its purpose is to take much of the human factor out of accuracy testing, much like the more complicated and heavier machine rests the military uses for acceptance testing of rifles. Bolt it down to a bench, and human shooters’ individual variation in pistol accuracy is erased. This is what the base Master Series Ransom Rest looks like:

Imura’s printed guns, seized along with his computers and printer when he was arrested.

Over at the CIA’s FOIA files, there’s a remarkable 1983 letter (.pdf) that more or less predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. Now, predicting the fall of the Soviet Union was a Cold War hobby of many people of many nationalities. Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik even wrote a book, Can the Soviet Union survive until 1984? Amalrik answered his question in the negative. He wasn’t so much wrong, as a few years ahead of the game.

Landing at Baton Rouge on 8 October 14, a pilot of a vintage taildragger locked up his brakes and dropped his nose expensively into the tarmac of Runway 13. Hey, it happens. But this time, it wasn’t a Cub or Taylorcraft doing a nose stand, but a multi-million dollar Focke-Wulf 190, one of a handful of airworthy examples of the Germans’ second most numerous WWII fighter.

This is a Sunday for doing the most routine things around the manner, like replacing the kitchen faucet (wait, aren’t we supposed to have people for that sort of thing?), blowing the leaves and mowing them up, and that sort of thing. So we took our sweet time putting up the Sunday nothing-much post. (And didn’t even look at a few overdue Saturday posts we have).

This may be our last unseasonably warm weekend of the year, and the bicycle sings out its desire to be ridden, and the dog needs a walk, and looking at glowing rectangles seems like an awful use of the day. So we won’t.

“The game is afoot, Watson!”

Singer-Songwriter Guy Clark with “The Randall Knife.”

We think the guys running TrackingPoint know what they have to do. In fact, we think they’re already doing these things. But here’s what, from our point of view, is missing from the current iteration of TrackingPoint hardware and software for real penetration into the upper tier SOF market.

Look at that case color! A Luciano Bosis ‘Michelangelo’ 12-bore shotgun (not the stolen gun, every Bosis is unique). From the Bosis website. Click to embiggen. 

Nathan Davan, from his MySpace account. If we love freedom, we love his freedom, too.

Bill Jordan, US Border Patrol, circa 1965.

TrackingPoint has refreshed its AR lineup in three calibers (5.56, 7.62, and .300 Win Mag) and also offers three things calculated to increase the appeal of their precision-guided firearms: lower prices, financing, and a virtual reality glass device, the Shotglass.

Er… yeah, in this post, that logo’s sarcasm.

Deskbound managers, who have replaced leaders in most military operations these days, are extremely enthusiastic about drones. Combat leaders are somewhat less so, leading us to this:

Drones will not be late to briefings, start fights at happy hour, destroy Officers Clubs, attempt to seduce others’ dates, purchase huge watches, insult other military services, sing “O’Leary’s Balls,” dance on tables, yell “Show us your tits!” or do all of the other things that we know wins wars!

This quote is attributed to one “Ace” Jewell, CDR USN, Ret. about whom the source email says,  “Now about 88, Fighter Pilot in 3 wars and LSO extraordinaire.”

Those things he mentions do win wars. Do we need to explain why?