Weapons Man

Sure, it looks innocent, even inviting. But this was Stephen King’s hot tub.

According to Al Jazeera, which is bent out of shape because the language forbidding the closure of Guantanamo remains, the President will sign the changed National Defense Authorization Act.

Meet the “Table Leg Typewriter”, recently written up in The Firearm Blog, it’s a beyond-crude SMG that can be made in a few hours from common materials and (mostly) simple tools. (The exception, the one tool that requires some practice to use, is a welder).

If you read this site, you probably read books.

We buy most of our books from Amazon. That works for new and used books. Today, however, Amazon presented us with a price we did not want to pay — hundreds of dollars for a used book. The same book was available on Google Play as a DRM’d ebook for $250. And it was a gun control textbook — every dollar of it going right to the enemies of America, freedom, and your gun rights.

Enter ABEBooks. The online used bookseller interface hooked us up with a copy of the previous edition for under six bucks, and several other used and out of print gun books.

It still won’t help you with a  real rarity — Balleisen’s Principles of Firearms is going for $400 here — but it gets you around the greedy professors who make frequent new editions to finance their lifestyles and their anti-gun activism. $6, and not a dime of it to the guy that would destroy us. That’s a win.

Definitely not Abdurraouf Eshati, 29, (pronunciation: Ab-doo-ah-ROOF is-SHIT-ty works for us) who claims to be from Wales but was busted with a bunch of other dodgy Arabs exploiting Europe’s open borders. CNN reports:

Dengue is pronounced like “den gay,” but it is not your buddy’s assessment that your Man Cave looks like it was redecorated by the cast of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Instead, it’s a nasty fever that has spread from its original nexus — which may have been the Upper Nile of Egypt 4,000 years ago — to endemic status in the tropics and subtropics of the world today.

Since today is Veterans’ Day, a holiday which had its genesis in the Armistice of the 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month of the Year of Our Lord 1918, dulce et decorum est to post something from the Great War.

From the M14 Forum comes this story of one man’s attempt to replicate the firearm of the man who inspired him to serve — US Army special operations soldier Randy Shughart, MOH. Shughart and his team leader Gary Gordon committed themselves to defend a helicopter crash site in Mogadishu in October, 1993, in the certain knowledge that those at the crash scene were doomed without them — and that the imbalance in forces was so great that they were likely only adding themselves to the death toll.

The media does what, again?

The worm in question: hymenolepis nana. Pretty little brute, growing inside a person.

The seller thinks somebody would. His reasoning? It’s not just anybody’s shirt. It’s on eBay right now. It’s this guy’s:

Bear with us a bit as we’re still sick as the proverbial dog, and translating a long document, courtesy of Nathaniel F of The Firearm Blog. Along with a couple of interesting series on oddball magazines and the mid-20th-Century Light Rifle concept (which yielded the NATO rifles of the second half of the century, until the resurgent intermediate assault rifle concept and the 5.56 cartridge replaced them), he’s also stayed on the Bundeswehr’s small arms scandals.

We’ve been waiting for more official information about the AC-130 attack on a Medecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders, a French-based medical nonprofit) trauma center in Konduz, Afghanistan, but no information from the US military investigation (most probably at this point a 15-6 investigation) has been publicly released.

Victoria Lane drank herself to death. And they say it wasn’t the vodka!

The Army personnel system is like the ancient Chinese mandarin system, except that it sucks even at producing mandarins. This should not be news to anybody. Certainly the best and the brightest — hell, even the dull and the dimmest — have been firing cannonades against DOPMA and “up-or-out” since Gabriel and Savage teed up Crisis in Command in the 1970s, and probably earlier. But along comes The Atlantic, commissioning retired general David Barno and some social (i.e., pseudo) scientist to write a jeremiad against the personnel system.

No, to steal a line from frequent commenter Aesop, we’re not dying any faster than anyone else, but we have a head and chest cold, maybe flu, and it’s had a weird effect (which is responsible for which most of our meatworld counterparties have noted as a weird affect this past week). One minute everything’s normal, and we’re getting on just fine and productively, so long as there’s a box of tissues/roll of paper towels/shop rag to snorkel into every couple minutes.

Laurie Beliveau of Taunton, MA, come on down! In Massachusetts, where guns are all but outlawed, bad things keep happening. The latest was the FOOM that left Laurie homeless, after an improvised hot-water-heater repair job.

52-year-old Laurie Beliveau of Taunton, got out of the house before the Sunday afternoon explosion and fire and no one was hurt.

State Fire Marshal Stephen Coan and Fire Chief Timothy Bradshaw said Monday that the woman was trying to repair her gas-fueled hot water heater and inadvertently removed the gas shut-off valve. This allowed gas to pour into the basement, where it ignited.

The blaze destroyed the single-family home after firefighters arrived. The flames have since been extinguished.

via Woman blows up house she was trying to fix | Fox News.

Don’t give up the day job, lady. As a plumber you have your limits.

This is going to be a brief post, but that’s because we’re sending you to a long .pdf.

Finger grooves are one of the perpetual battles of the firearms world. Some firearms have ’em, some don’t. And some shooters like ’em, some don’t. We propose a radical idea: whether or not you like the grooves probably depends on how the grooves fit your hand.

Football: Tom Brady Signature Edition!