Weapons Man

Savage Arms employed about 600 people when it was bought by defense giant ATK in 2013. Now about 440 people go to work at the company’s Westfield, Massachusetts facility, after the latest batch of 37 were shown the door this week. The company’s workforce is already 27% smaller (26 point repeating 6, to be pedantic about it) than it was at the time of the acquisition. It’s either struggling to sell its products in the hottest market ever, or was the first victim of the market’s regression to the mean, or ATK is eliminating positions made redundant by the acquisition — which seems unlikely, with the layoff count so high in less than a year, but it’s possible.

Savage makes well-regarded, attractively-priced and accurate bolt-action rifles, a line of rimfires, and the excellent  Savage Range Systems “snail traps” that are ubiquitous on indoor ranges these days. The company recorded $200 million in revenue in 2013.

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You have to love Boston. There, fire and police authorities sat on a fire investigation for a couple of weeks, so as not to distract from the spectacular funerals for two firemen, and the mayor’s chance to make a speech on TV.

The cause of the fire? Reckless welding. It has Boston Herald columnist Peter Gelzinis outraged:

Now we know what had been rumored for days — officials say the inferno at 298 Beacon St. that took the lives of Boston fire Lt. Edward J. Walsh Jr. and firefighter Michael R. Kennedy was set off by sparks from a welder’s torch.

But apparently what the cops, fire investigators and Suffolk prosecutors have yet to figure out is whether or not firing up a welding torch in the middle of 40 to 50 mph winds meets the legal standard of “wanton and reckless behavior.”

If it doesn’t, I’d say it comes damn close.

Back on Wednesday, March 26, Boston was spared the snow that h

Even though this video was posted April 1 in the Netherlands, it’s not (just) a joke.

Explanation overleaf….

If you’re not an art fan, you might not recognize the characters at first, but in the end, they assemble into a tableau portraying a famous Rembrandt — the objective of the stunt was to promote the museum that’s showing the masterpiece, The Night Watch. 

The picture was not originally this dark; it has darkened with age, and was already some 200 years old when the name The Night Watch was attached to it for the first time.

A Dutch art website explains the significance of the characters in the picture:

Perhaps the most famous painting is the work by Rembrandt known as The Night Watch. It is a group portrait of a mi

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has ruled that the muzzle brake for the SIG-Sauer MP-X Carbine model is “intended only for use” as a silencer. (We covered the introduction of the MP-X in January, 2013). The timeline of the whole SIG-ATF interaction also serves as an illustration for the glacial pace at which the payroll patriots of ATF do, or don’t do, just about anything:

1. 4 Apr 2013: MPX-C submitted by SIG to ATF’s FIrearms Technology Branch (FTB)for evaluation.
2. 26 Aug 2013: (note, 153 days later — ATF speed) FTB rules that the muzzle brake is a silencer. It is, says FTB, a “monolithic baffle stack. Welding it to a barrel does not change its characteristics or function.”
3. 6 Sep 2013: (10 days later — private sector speed) SIG responds to ATF with the results of tests that show that the device does reduce recoil and muzzle rise, but that instead of silencing

Let’s review the last five major shootings at military bases and see what lessons we can learn from them. Let’s start a little over five years ago, in an incident Eric Holder and two nutless Secretaries of Defense have described as “workplace violence.” As if anyone was still mystified about why Nidal Hasan went postal one day….

A radicalized, fundamentalist Moslem carried out the highest sacrament of his faith: mass murder. He was known to all as a supporter of jihad, but no one did anything before his crimes, because an Islamic bean is a pearl beyond price, at least to the beancounters in Army personnel.

As he murdered one unarmed victim after another, at least three brave attempts to charge him barehanded brought a soldier a hero’s death, and a fourth resulted in the soldier receiving crippling wounds. He was finally stopped when armed police officers responded to a 911 call, and shot and critically wounded him. Until he was incapacitated by gunfire, he never stopped killing.

The media, being the media, praised the lady cop that the assailant wounded and disabled, and more or less ignored the male cop who actually stopped him. Amazon narrative, you know.

The Army resisted external investigation, and senior Army officers an

So, here were four police officers from a regional drug task force shot and wounded by a no-account drug dealer who also murdered the local police chief and his girlfriend. (Since this whole thing went down within a few miles of Hog Manor, we wrote about it quite extensively. Our original report; our references to the criminal, whose brain-dead visage graces the page to the left).

The cops have a lawsuit, charging that the criminal’s mother provided him the guns. (He was armed with a .357 and a Ruger 9mm. He used the Ruger to shoot the cops. The .357 was purchased by the ill-fated girlfriend at a gun show; the seller was an FFL and she passed the NICS check). Their only problem was: the ATF would not give them the trace information on the gun with which they were all shot. So they sued, as this story from April 2 show

We’ve been big enthusiasts for the Fox light comedy Enlisted, which strikes us as a sort of modern-day F Troop or McHale’s Navy. But as you probably know, the show has been, not exactly canceled, but replaced, which sure looks like “canceled” to us, from outside the industry.

The show got good notices from critics, but never achieved the ratings it needed. It was in a crummy time slot, with a crummy lead-in, but it was a really good, sweet, positive show, which poked fun at the Army without the usual Hollywood nihilism. Maybe that’s why it failed; maybe there’s something in that nihilism that turns into popular viewing. We don’t know.

There are still a few episodes in the can, but it went off the air at the end of March, and we’ll see those episodes who knows where, who knows when. The Wire:

That brings us to Enlisted, whi

Nammo BNT 6 Reduced Range 7.62 x 51 mm

We all know that dimples can make a smile irresistible. But a bullet?

Nammo is making 7.62 x 51mm rounds with dimples, and it’s about their physical attraction — sort of. That’s if you’ll accept the meaning of “physical” as in “laws of physics,” and to be more specific, aerodynamics. By making the projectile more physically attractive to the air it passes through — sort of, reversing centuries on progress in making wind-cheating bullets — they can make rounds that work for training on tight, urban ranges.

The Nammo BNT 6 Reduced Range load contains a unique dimpled round weighing 6.2 grams or about 95.7 grains, so it’s very light for a 7.62 round. Its muzzle velocity is in the usual NATO ballpark at 860 m/s (2822 fps). At short ranges (<200m) Nammo claims that the ro

That’s one of our take-aways from this report on the state crime lab.  While a lot of the crime lab is dedicated to drugs and toxicology,

Three walls of a room in the state crime lab’s criminalistic department are lined with guns seized from New Hampshire crime scenes, ranging from palm-sized pistols to a rocket launcher found in someone’s apartment.

There’s also a water tank, through which bullets are shot from suspect guns before the spent bullets are retrieved and compared to evidence found at crime scenes or in bodies.

Bullets are made “a hair larger” than their intended gun barrels, so they take on unique markings, Pifer explained.

Through electronic Leica microscopes, which display split images of the ballistics evidence next to test samples, scientists can reach eureka moments when evidence links a gun to a shooter. Sometimes the science is aimed at finding criminals, Pifer said, other times it’s to determine which of several police officers at a scene fired a shot.

Thanks to crime shows, most people have an idea (if an exaggerated idea) of what ballistics evidence can do. Most people don’t know, however, how easy it is to restore defaced serial numbers.

If serial numbers have been filed off of

The Great Black & White Hype? It’s in the newspaper, it turns out . Criminology professor James Fox, coming from a liberal second-string university in Boston, no less, is taking the press to task for its “active shooter” hype. He also gets in some licks on Eric Holder, a sport which appeals increasingly to players from all shades of the political spectrum.

In his speech last October, Attorney General Eric Holder was anything but circumspect in describing the emerging trend almost in epidemic proportions. Reflecting on a recent FBI-sponsored report on active shooters, Holder noted that over a span of just four years, America had “witnessed an increase of nearly 150% in the number of people shot and killed in connection with active shooter incidents.”

Unfortunately, there is much confusion about what an active shooter is exactly. A CNN report from last January, under the headline “Mass shootin

If you can call what passes for justice in North Korea — the whim of the latest inbred midget king of the inbred midget Kim Dynasty — “Justice,” that is. South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo:

The North Korean regime has shut down the Workers Party department once headed by purged eminence grise Jang Song-taek and executed or interned 11 high-ranking officials, sources said Sunday.

One of them was burned alive.

Boy, that really sounds like a society and government that’s confident of its strength. And ruled with great wisdom and mercy, too! What’s next?

A source said the regime is preparing a third purge of officials who supported Jang. The first purge involved his family, relatives and high-ranking party officials, while t

Our first indication that a Victoria, TX FFL was in deep trouble was a rather badly-written TV story. (We’ve just pulled a few short grafs out, Read The Whole Thing™ if you doubt our criticism. On the other hand, unlike us, he was writing to a deadline, so there is that):

On March 13th, ATF agents raided [Garrett] Riedesel’s Double D Gun Shop, and took almost 117 firearms.

According to documents from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Riedesel possessed items that were not registered with the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record, which is a federal offense.

Riedesel was only licensed to deal firearms that did not require those specific registrations.

via Gun Shop Owner Facing Federal Charges – Crossroad

Unlike most TV cop shows, this one showcases real murders, and therefore, real murderers. Here are 10 things about murderers that you’ll never pick up if you watch scripted TV shows, but any homicide cop could have told you:

1. Murderers are career criminals, usually. Criminals are generally pretty stupid people. For every Professor Moriarty in fiction, there’s ten thousand full-retard street criminals in the Lifer Wing of the jug.
2. Most victims don’t die for anything big. They are killed in petty disputes, or in the pursuit of de minimis thefts.
3. There’s usually a lot of emotion involved in a murder. The exceptions are the robberies.
4. A robbery turned murder is not, despite the show and even the cops using the term, a “robbery gone wrong.” It’s a robbery gone one of the two ways the robbers expected it to go; if some armed robbers never kill any of their victims, that’s strictly accidental. (This, then

Andrew Ward, now a two-time murderer.

We mentioned this guy in passing back in our last Tour d’Horizon: a mentally ill career criminal who’s been in the jug 11 times since 2006. He made news back in March when he murdered his 12-year-old brother. His statement at the time was: “Honestly, I just felt like killing.” Despite being in a place where he presumably can’t get those evil old guns, he still seems to “feel like killing.” In this case, his cellmate, an armed robber. And once again he did it without access to firearms:

Andrew Ward, 27, was arrested on suspicion of first-degree murder in the Wednesday night killing of cellmate Douglas Walker, 33, in a Maricopa County jail in Phoenix, the Sheriff’

“Ha,” you say. “What good is a lieutenant’s advice? By definition, he’s the new guy that doesn’t know anything!” But you can’t beat an LT’s advice when it’s being given to future lieutenants — the cadets of his alma mater, the United States Military Academy. When you stumble into your first platoon thinking that you’re probably Patton, if not Napoleon, you’re looking at a 300-meter target; you need to focus on the 50-meter target of platoon command.

Our own experience of West Pointers, we have often noted, suggests a bimodal distribution: they’re either awesome warriors, or worthless tools. They’re never mediocre, and they’re never stupid. (Stupid officers are unfortunately not as rare as you might think. They tend to have majored in football at enormous universities).

1LT Scott Ginther has a lot of good advice for a young lieutenant, and some of it is applicable to anybody who leads people. It’s also very useful to anyone hoping to understand today’s Army.

5.    Most of the time you’ll have no idea what you’re doing – This cold buck

Painting: August 7, 1942, Saburo Sakai attacks VB-6.

Recently we had some discussion in the comments, after we posted words to the effect of, “would you want to face Saburo Sakai with these?” and an illustration of a pair of ANM2 .30 Browning machine guns. Several commenters noted that somebody did, in an SBD Dauntless rather than the SB2C Helldiver whose tail-gun installation was shown.

In fact, on August 7, 1942, then-PO1 Sakai and another A6M2 Zero pilot swept in behind a formation of eight Grumman Wildcats. It was only on closing in that they discovered that they were hitting, not fighters with forward-firing armaments only, but the Douglas Dauntlesses of Bombing Squadron Six from USS Enterprise. At 300 yards (well within the range of the SBD’s twin .30 guns) Sakai realized his mistake. To turn now was to expose a larger aspect of his aircraft to American gunfire — the best

At the end of which, We Are Home.

Neglecting work —  minus some dollars

Neglecting the blog — a dent to reputation for consistency

Spending time with family — priceless.

There will be no apologies coming.

Terrence V. Hartley. Courtesy Portsmouth NH PD.

They’re now saying it was a “metal bat,” and they’ve thrown the book at Terrence Hartley:

A Maine man who committed a masked home invasion in the Maple Haven neighborhood — during which he clubbed two people with a metal bat — was given four 7½- to 15-year state prison sentences Friday.

Terrence Hartley, 47, of 179 Tardiff Road, Clinton, pleaded guilty to and was sentenced for two felony counts of burglary and two felony counts of first-degree assault, according to the Rockingham Superior Court. The four state prison sentences are to run consecutive to each other, meaning his total sentence is 30 to 60 years in state prison.

As part of a plea agreement, four other charges alleging first-degree assault and a felony alleging his possession of cocaine were dismissed, according to the court.

via

The payroll patriots and jumped-up welfare leeches that populate government agencies know one thing: they’re untouchable. So far, the worst thing that’s happened to Boston Inspectional Services Department’s Susan Coppinger after being caught for two bank robberies? She’s been given extra, non-chargeable vacation till it all blows over.

And, oh yeah, promoted. And given a $10k raise! The Boston Herald reported:

A clerk in Boston’s Inspectional Services Department is accused of moonlighting as a bank robber — allegedly twice hitting up the same Quincy branch with notes pleading: “I am desperate” — and yet was promoted to code enforcer after being charged, the Herald has learned.

Susan M. Coppinger, 47, of Dorchester, whose photo has appeared on the law enforcement website Mass Most Wanted since her first alleged bank heist on Nov. 16, remains free on $1,000 bail following her December

Sun n Fun is an airshow in Florida every spring; it’s the second biggest airshow in the US (the king of them all is Airventure in Oshkosh, Wisconsin at the end of July and beginning of August). So your humble host befinds himself there on business, but can’t stop looking at the guns.

For instance, there’s this .50 gun, badly corroded, that was excavated from a buried wreck of a wartime B-17. It appears to have been a waist gun. (These pictures do embiggen, but on this one the original’s kind of fuzzy. Up close, the gun is severely corroded and pitted).

Then, there’s this fixed gun, barely visible in the wing root of a Douglas AD-5 Skyraider (after 1962 known as the A-1E), a plane that was designed for World War II, delivered too late, and went on to be a workhorse of the Korean and Vietnam wars. The gun is the M2 20mm cannon, a rather unreliable copy of the Hispano-Suiza Hs.404 that was the standard US 20mm in the 2nd World War.