Weapons Man

Admiral William McRaven, who should need no introduction to this audience, spoke at the commencement ceremony for the University of Texas this year; he himself was a Longhorn and was commissioned from the NROTC program there in 1977, so, like us, he had the grim experience of the Carter era tempered by the positive experience of Vietnam-vet mentorship. He spoke to over 8,000 graduates (we knew they did things big in the Lone Star State, but we had no idea, given our history with a bunch of little colleges nobody famous ever came from).

Is this a case of Bubba the Gunsmith devaluing a collector gun?

We haven’t many, actually. And those that we have, the most important ones, we prefer to keep private. We hope you don’t mind.

Death is lighter than a feather, but duty is heavier than a mountain.

What we’re talking about here is a documentary, or rather a series of television documentaries. Guns is a seven part documentary series the traces the history of firearms from the matchlock to today’s modern weapons. It does this by combining narration with historical footage (where available), still images (where film is not, for instance of the Revolutionary War), reenactments, and historic weapons displayed by museum curators.

Welcome to the National Capital Area, where being the right race gets you a discount on your charges when you kill someone with your bare hands. In this case, road-rage murderer Librado Cena is pretty much getting a pass for beating a guy to death.

Look at these two yahoos. And we use the term in the sense in which Swift originally coined it.

This is a great photo by a Marine photographer, taken this month in the sky above our forgotten expeditionary force in Afghanistan. Official caption below; we want to say a few words about the helicopter, and the gun.

This one’s been sitting around since March, unfinished, but we still have the jaws about it, and events this week compelled us to update and hit “send.”

Meet Bernard Marsonek. Marsonek’s in a spot of trouble, not least for having a gun and ammunition when the police searched his house, because he’s already a convicted felon. He also had eight “large” pitbulls (what, there’s another size?).

If you’re a combat vet of Iraq, Afghanistan, or even Korea or Vietnam, there’s a way to get around the treatment delays, indifference, and incompetence of the VA: join Al-Qaeda, declare jihad on your countrymen, and get your hiney sent to Guantanamo Bay. There, the DOD takes pride in extending to mass murderers and terrorists, better care than American soldiers, sailors, airmen or Marines can get.

ATF managers (“leaders” is totally the wrong word) say they need laws that do away with such minor details as having to prove intent. Little things that used to be called civil liberties. Because they say that without an overturning of jurisprudential concepts already old at the time of Blackstone’s Commentaries, they can’t convict gunrunners or straw buyers.

These are things that don’t rate a story on their own, that have been hanging around in the queue or the tabs for a while.

We’ve made fun before of the way coastal papers love to amplify bad news from flyover country. What does it mean that we found this tale of classic California crazy on the Wichita Eagle’s website? And crazy it is.

Hendry N. Brown, during a stint on the right side of the law. He does look a bit charismatic to us. (Embiggens a little).

A posse hastily formed on 30 Apr 1884 to pursue bank robbers. Elaboration at 11. (This one doesn’t embiggen, sorry). Turns out not all posses are in old tintypes.

Why do a bunch of gun guys want to look at what the ONR is doing? Because the ONR is working on one of our favorite themes: what’s next? By that we mean that current projectile weapons technology is a very evolved version of late 19th century breakthroughs such as breech loading, smokeless powder, fixed ammunition, gas- and recoil-operated automatic weapons, and (for artillery) recoil-managing carriages.

But they’re apparently unwilling to give us a break and stop failing, or take any concrete measures (meaning, more concrete than bleating “unacceptable,” feigning anger, or threatening the kind of “accountability” that never separates a bureaucrat’s plush seat from his office chair’s plush seat).

Jill Hansen, in an image from her Honolulu PD Frequent Flyer Card.