Weapons Man

Major General Snow after the war, with US and Allied decorations.

Cat got your tongue?

Or are you worried about consequences?

We don’t think the ATF has it in for outspoken folks any more than it has it in for all of us. But there are two useful principles to remember when dealing with the ATF.

1. To the limited extent a problem is of ATF’s creation, it probably was created entirely by managers, over the strenuous objections of line agents or inspectors; and,
2. A lot of the beefs people have with “the ATF” result not from anything the bureau did, but with the internally contradictory laws that they are commanded to enforce.

Almost all the dumbest stuff in the US Code relative to firearms emanated not ex cathedra from the Throne of Elliot Ness, but from the kindergarten we call a legislature.

In conversations with our local police chief, we learned that he’s had an awful lot of trouble with burglary victims having lost property that they can’t describe accurately. That makes a certain amount of sense: after all, do you know the serial number of your computer? Your flat screen TV? Of course not.

If you use the ATF’s eForms program, you probably know this already, and you’d been expecting it for some time: the eForms system that is used by many businesses is hors de combat.

Hmmm. This article at OAFNation is drawing a lot of attention this week. It has a number of interesting points, and here are a couple of them:

Robert Whitehead was a pacifist and teetotaler, who invented the naval torpedo and sold it all around the world: a weapon now well into its second century of use and development.

Here at Weaponsman, we’ve discussed naval torpedoes before. We’ve done it in the light of early American torpedoes that have been recovered from the bottom of the sea, or otherwise rediscovered, and displayed in museums or otherwise studied. But the very first torpedo, at least the first successful one, came from the forgotten Navy of the Habsburg Empire, by way of an English inventor and entrepreneur.

Fortunately, there is a place where this early history is not only not forgotten, but preserved and memorialized, and it is present on the web at Torped

Today, the Eagle feeds. (In real life, the swan got away. Great photo though).

April 15th may not mean much to our international readers, but it’s the day we USian taxpaying throgs owe our third (or half, if you’ve selected your state unwisely or earned too much, or more, if you’ve done both) of our productivity to the most unproductive organization on earth, the various levels of US Government. You send it in along with your “tax return,” a document whose very name implies that it’s the .gov’s money all along, they were just letting you earn it for them. Right generous of them.

Because we experienced the unusual combination of a weak earning year and a good investment year, 2013 was a little peculiar: the amount we just sent in with a Federal extension was more than we actually made working. We’v

Yesterday we introduced you to Kill Chain Analysis, and we failed to link the Senate Commerce Committee Report on the Target data breach. (That’s been corrected in that doc, and also here, now).

Today, here’s a couple more foundational documents.

Hutchins, et al. Intelligence-Driven Computer Network Defense Informed by Analysis of Adversary Campaigns and Intrusion Kill Chains. This is the original 2009 Lockheed-Martin White Paper that introduced the concept of the Cyber kill chain. It’s full of warmhearted warmaking wonder, like this buzzword-compliant table of potential countermeasures by phase:

It’s worth reading especially for the case study of a sophisticated, imaginative an

Let us set up this video. It’s a one minute clip from an IMAX film, Fighter Pilot, and the whole movie actually tells more of the story of the F-15s than the A-10s they’re escorting, but the clip focuses on one A-10 gun run. This is a trip to the range for live fire, and the sequence of events is this:

1. You see F-15s (these might be Strike Eagles) breaking left and right (a two-ship each way).
2. A two-ship element of A-10s fires flares, fires a GAU-8 burst, and breaks left.
3. Either another element, or the same one shown again? Both A-10 elements are shown first from behind and overhead, then from beside, obviously filmed from another aircraft.
4. Then you see the ground point of view. You see F-15s approaching on the deck, and a tank (an old M60A1 deployed as a range target) on the left. If you look closely (and have the video  on full screen) you can see the Warthogs below and behind the fighters.
5. Some A-10 pilots clearly have more luck, or skill, than others. You can wound personnel in the open with 30mm near-misses, but nothing but hits will kill a tank. You’ll see plenty of hits, though, and the target’s-eye view was worth the risk of an unattended (obviously) camera.

We have this book and we paid full freight for it, and it was worth every damn penny. You can get it for 25% off, if you act now.

Did we mention that we liked and recommend the book?

The book, The Law of Self Defense, is by the nation’s leading self-defense legal expert, Andrew Branca, a Massachusetts (of all places!) lawyer. And now you can get it for 25% off, and you can give credit to the CSGV, which is some anti-gun group. (They don’t have much of a real-world presence, they’re just more Bloomberg astroturf, which is why we forget how the acronym breaks out, but it’s something along the lines of Criminals Shooting Guns Viciously, or something like that).

You can get the book here, and put the following code in to save 25%: @CSGV.

Heh. As Andrew said in his Tweet announcing the price break, “No joke.”

So why did he give credit to his readers, in the name of

Lockheed-Martin researchers have developed a method of analysis, which helps to analyze cyber attacks like the ones deployed by criminals against the US branch of the multinational Target department-store chain, and the ones by state actors against such targets as foreign enemies or competitors, breakaway republics, or destabilizing religious groups.

Similar methods are used by the NSA at the behest of DHS and DOJ against domestic targets including mainstream (but non-incumbent) political parties and campaigns, and are probably used by authoritarian, totalitarian and police states worldwide to monitor opposition elements. All these cyber attacks can be analyzed within the Lockheed Martin framework, which is called Kill Chain Analysis.

Lockheed Martin’s essential concept is that there are certain steps that must be executed to conduct any cyber attack. Each of these steps is dependent on the one immediately before it, and all the ones before that. Interrupting or disrupting any of these steps, in other words, “breaking the kill chain,” conclusively interrupts, disrupts, or prevents the cyber attack. Here are the steps graphically, from a US Senate Commerce Committee report on the Target intrusion.

The ATF has proposed removing some items from The US Military Imports List, thereby deregulating the import of these items. It’s uncommon enough that even a citizen-oriented, constitutionally-chartered agency releases a grip on anything at all; to see it from the high-handed and expansionist ATF is extremely rare.

But here it is, right in the Federal Register. Note that two Lists control the import and export of arms, ammunition, and Significant Military Equipment: The The United States Munitions List, which is controlled by the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls of the lotus-eaters in the State Department, and the United States Munitions Import List (Title 27 Part 447), which is controlled by the ATF. The two lists are not the same and are not especially in agreement with one another; this has to do with the ATF import list.

The Department is removing from the USMIL Category I—Firearms, paragraph (e), ‘‘Riflescopes manufactured to military specific

We’re lifting this from Dan Cotterman’s Handloading column in the September/October, 1983, edition of American Handgunner magazine.

Dan, wherever he is, may well forgive us, because he in turn lifted the idea from Vern Speer (of Speer reloading fame), as he freely admits:

The late Vern Speer years ago worked out an uncomplicated and quite practical method for determining relative chamber pressures. Observing, and rightly so, that different guns produce pressures in differing amplitudes, and that test data from serious laboratories using pressure guns were often less than consistent, Spear said he’d discovered a more reliable process.

Acknowledging the fact that the cartridge case is the weakest link in the chain of components, he wrote:

“If the pressures at which these cartridge cases are fired do not exceed the elastic lim

The answer to that shouldn’t be too hard. And it shouldn’t hinge on what jurisdiction we’re in. If we’re living in the physical world, and “I” am anybody at all, you’re asking for trouble to believe my words over the evidence of direct observation. But if we’re in Indiana, and I’m a cop, my false testimony literally has more weight than video evidence that contradicts it.

This is the consequence of the Indiana Supreme Court going Full Retard in the case of Robinson v. Indiana (or is it Indiana v. Robinson?). TechDirt has the, well, dirt (although if there’s any tech here, we don’t see it):

Seeing how often official reports by law enforcement are contradicted by video recordings, you’d think judges would have become a bit more skeptical about the supposed “superiority” of officers&#

Here in the Granite State we’re having a late spring this season. We’ve still got a little snow on the ground (it will be gone before the temperatures get cold again later this week). Nothing’s up but crocuses yet. The trees and bushes are barely budding, and we’re still dealing with the tons of oak leaves (not an exaggeration, “tons”) that dropped after last year’s early snows made it impossible to pick them up.

But when the sun is shining and it’s bicycle weather one’s attitude has nowhere to go but up. Hope you’re having a great Sunday, too. See you on the blog tomorrow.

It’s 15 of 14, and we missed 14 of 14 but hope to fill it back in. We also want to be younger, slimmer, and able to run again, but we might actually succeed in posting last week’s TW3 this time. But we wouldn’t hold our breath if we were you. On the other hand, we did post on time this week. There is that.

This week has a 1-day blog micro-hiatus on Wednesday, and a 1-day real hiatus as we spent a day in a 3D Printing seminar Friday. It was worthwhile and we learned a new technique which we hadn’t known was possible, printing dies for hydroforming (we’re presuming sheet aluminum, but we’re not sure). We got some hands on with a close cousin of the 3D Systems printer one might use for printing wax-casting patterns, which might have some real-world applications to bringing some obsolete parts back to life around here. We already knew you could do lost-PLA casting with printed parts, and make molds for short-run injection molding. Still, the parts that were manufacturable by some of the best-developed technol

Usually, we have no problem either summarizing or forming an opinion of a movie. This one is a rare exception; even after watching the DVD twice, and giving it two weeks of reflection, we’re still not entirely certain how we feel about it.

It’s a powerful film that has several different ambitions: it wants to be a coming-of-age film, it wants to be a powerful antiwar and anti-military statement, and it wants to entertain people. As a result, it motors back-and-forth between different sets of tone, imagery, and feeling. Some of this ambivalence reflects the ambivalence in the underlying source material, the late Nicholas Proffitt’s novel, which is thoroughly tied up in his own rejection of his own military experience. (Proffitt dropped out of West Point and spent three years’ penance in the Old Guard, the Army’s ceremonial unit

Nothing gets more bitter than taxi medallion disputes. Cities limit the number of medallions in order to favor cronies or insiders, and as a result, taxi operators engage in range wars that only the direction of John Ford could possibly bring to the screen.

Your city doesn’t even have to be big to have one of these disputes going on, it just has to have some central-planning commissar micromanaging the medallions, and next thing you know, it’s sheep man versus cattle man and devil take the hindmost. Like in sleepy Portsmouth, NH, population 28,000 or so, of whom only the welfare class seems to take taxis anyway (and the taxis look that way):

A city cab driver says he was cut off by a competing cabbie who tried to “run (him) off the road” in the midst of ongoing disputes about medallions to operate cabs in the city.

“He used his vehicle to endanger me,” said John Palreiro, owner of Great Bay Taxi.

John Palreiro, owner of Great Bay Taxi, provided this

This is the guy whose reaction to the murder of disarmed victims has been to try to disarm them further for the next killer: USD(I) Michael Vickers.

In a report on the Navy Yard mass shooting written by the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, a political appointee, the Department of Defense never addressed the defenselessness of the victims. Instead, they doubled down on the failed policy of victim disarmament.

We saw the result of this bad DOD policy recently at Fort Hood, although the Army and military-in-general brass are stupid enough that this guy’s (image right) pigheadedness didn’t singlehandedly kill the three Hood victims.

Privately-owned Weapons on DoD Installations

Continued from: The Genesis of the Volkssturm Carbines. Why? published March 27, 2014. 

When we last looked at the Volkssturm carbines, it was late summer or early fall of 1944, and a handful of the guns were about to be presented to Hitler as a sort of staff decision memo by Reichsminister for Armaments and War Production, Albert Speer. The weapons included several single-shot and repeating bolt guns, and a version of the famous, if very rare, VG 1-5.

Purportedly after doing this, Speer wrote and transmitted the following (emphasis added):

The Reichs Minister for Armaments and War Production

TAE-no. 99 10786/44 secret

Berlin, the 5th of November 1944

Pariser Platz 3

SECRET

(to: [action copies])