Weapons Man

Here’s a Glock 17 with a TRijicon RMR, The guns in the study were the slightly smaller but similar G19

According to what appears to be a Norwich University undergraduate study from 2011 that was recently noted by Soldier Systems Daily, the answer is in and it’s a strong “yes.” From the report’s Executive Summary:

This project examined the comparative effectiveness of traditional iron pistol sights with Trijicon, Inc.’s red dot optic sight. Twenty-seven students from Norwich University participated by undergoing a simulated training course of fire using International Defensive Pistol Association (IDPA) silhouette targets for four different stages. Thirteen students used iron sights and 14 studen

Now, we have many problems in rural New Hampshire, most of them associated with an influx of aging hippie boomers from Massachusetts, but God in His mercy has not delivered unto us the plague of hogs that bedevil the farmers of much of the USA.

Mike Baron tells the story of the day a 998-pound hog “et” Cody Lee’s little sister, and how the hog had not a friend in the world that day, apart from the fine people of PETA. From Cody Lee’s point of view:

I knew we were close. I could smell thet hog. I saw one of Rose Marie’s shoes, didn’t stop to pick it up. Ned and Ethan right behind a whoopin’ and a hollerin’. And right behind them come the PETA people waving red flags, banging on tambourines, and singing “We shall overcome.” They must have had a real quick committee-type meeting and voted to give chase, bravely putting their own lives in danger to save the sister-eatin’, murderin’ hog.

Swear to God.

I came to a woodfall, a ten-foot bird’s nest made of thorns. I could hear that old hog layin’ in there, huffing and chuffing. I could smell him. But I couldn’t see him, and it would have been plum foolish to go looking for him in there. We all know about Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch, and I weren&

Ah, America. Give us your hungry, your poor… your huddled masses of alcoholics looking to emigrate to new shores where they can kill and be killed in novel, if not to say bizarre, ways. Ana Trujillo, come on down!

A Houston woman attacked her boyfriend in a fit of rage, sat on him after knocking him down and then stabbed him to death with the stiletto heel of her shoe, striking him at least 25 times in the face, a prosecutor told jurors Monday.

Ana Trujillo’s lawyer, though, said it was she who was attacked, and she defended herself from 59-year-old Alf Stefan Andersson using the only weapon she had available.

Yeah, because nothing says “self-defense” like getting the guy down on the ground and applying puncture-wound overkill. Wonder where Andrew Branca would take this. (Our guess is that in an early conference, he’d be telling his client, “we can try the self-defense argument, but I really see this as a ‘disposition case’&#822

Last time we checked in with the Portsmouth, NH, PD, they were recovering from a fire in their indoor pistol range. Now they have a new problem: a plague of rats. Like this guy, now a good rat for the first time in his rodent life:

That may have been the rat “as big as a possum!” sighted under a copier late last year; the copy room is safe from him, at least, for now, but the cops and the department’s civilian workers can hear the things in the walls and ceilings.

Several exterminators have tried to accomplish the Rattus equivalent of pulling the sword out of the stone since the cops got serious about evicting their rent-free tenants a year and a half ago, and so far, the rats seem to be hanging on.

Maybe they shouldn’t have extinguished that range fire after all!

Ye Olde Hognose is in Lakeland, Florida with the Hogbrother today and tomorrow, mixing business and pleasure whilst attending the Sun n Fun airshow. Drop a note in comments if any of you are there. We’ll be at a hotel just off-site this evening.

In this video, You Are There™ as SSG John Arcularius of the US Army Reserve Shooting Team delivers a class on Marksmanship for the Squad Designated Marksman for designated marksmen of the 2/504 Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 82nd Airborne Division.

As it is classroom, mostly podium, instruction, it may be a bit slow for some of you. Pay attention, though! Even though Arcularius spends most of his time on the boring old fundamentals of marksmanship, centuries (literally!) of experience has taught the Army as an institution that the boring old fundamentals are still the best way of putting warheads on foreheads — when the “warheads” at issue are M118ER 158-grain slugs.

The M14 in general is not a sniper-accuracy weapon, although the M21s once built by the National Match armorers, and any gun built by one of the dwindling set of smiths initiated in the dark art of M1 and M14 National Match accuracy tuning, can be. But these rifles the SDMs have are M14EBR-RI models, which stands for M14 Enhanced Battle Rifle – Rock Island. As the name suggests, they’re built at the Rock Island Arsenal from stored M14 generic rack grade rifles. Whil

We’ve already mentioned the bizarre symbiosis between Leland Y. Yee, the accused gunrunner and the extremely anti-gun #2 potentate in the California State Senate, on the one hand; and the lapdog, lickspittle pack of Bay Area journalists, on the other. The soi-disant journalists were so joined with him ideologically that they never, ever, investigated him until after they had the occasion to film him be-boppin’ along in the perp promenade.

It was more than just shared fealty to The Party, although that was a large part of it. As long as he would say what they wanted him to say, they took no interest whatsoever in what he chose to do. 

But that’s not really fair to them, to say they weren’t interested in Yee and his doings. They were interested: in fact, at least a dozen times, journalistic groups like the Society of Professional Journalists, honored the creep.

This was one of at least two SP

When the scalps Richard Bistrong delivered to Federal prosecutors got away, they took his as a consolation prize. He’s out of prison now, but no one will ever trust him again.

Recently, we told a story of how the ATF used a paid felon informant, and an attorney’s own willingness to suspend disbelief that he was being set up, to put the attorney away for years. Despite the high-profile given to undercover work against violent criminal organizations, this use of informants to target people who might be seduced over the line of the law is much more typical of how the Federal anti-gun police work.

You may remember a series of arrests at the 2010 SHOT Show — made with a Barnum blare of publicity, with federal agents helping the media spin the arrests as evidence that the entire show, and indeed the entire industry, were

NSA knows you own guns. That’s the only possible inference from recent traffic-analysis research conducted with Stanford University volunteers by Stanford grad student Jonathan Meyer, his co-author Patrick Mutchler, and a team of researchers. They used an Android app installed by study volunteers to collect the same metadata that NSA collects and retains on every American’s every phone call. They wondered what they might find, and suspected that the assurances of such characters as NSA’s dishonest Director Clapper, who perjured himself before Congress denying the existence of this program; President Obama, who dismissed ; Senator Feinstein, who dismissed privacy concerns; and many others, might be bogus.

As they explain, it their app should let them answer some simple questions.

This is, at base, a factual dispute. Is it easy to draw sensitive inferences from phone metadata? How often do people conduct sensitive matters by phone,

Here’s a Chinese defense show from 2008 with an attractive lady interviewer asking rather incisive questions of an Army ordnance officer involved in the development of the weapon, Senior Engineer An Bao Ling, and the Chinese version of a think-tank guy, Professor Zhang Zhao Zhong.

This is a playlist that should play all three sections,

And here are all three parts individually if you want to do this the hard way.

Part 1 of 3 (7:05)

Part 2 of 3 (6:05)

Part 3 of 3 (6:00)

There are subtitles for those of us who are dumber than 1 Billion Han Chinese, including their kids and mental defectives.

While we’re impressed with the interviewer, Professor Zhong comes across as a bit of a pedant. Senior En

That’s the press for you: sucking-up to the comfortable and grinding the faces of the afflicted in the dirt. Consider the case of gun-control-poster-child Leland Y. Yee, who had a secret identity worthy of some comic book chump in homoerotic tights: Mighty Yee, the International Arms Merchant.

Yee was against anyone owning dangerous weapons of mass destruction — who didn’t give him money.

Now the San Francisco Chronicle spent years tongue-bathing Yee in gauzy profiles and airy puff pieces, accompanied by photographs with the equivalent of Vaseline on the lens. With Yee jammed up, the Chron lost its love for Yee faster than a fickle teenybopper changing pop stars. Now it did something it never bothered to do during Yee’s years as a top legislator: it broke out the roll call reports and compared his votes, his stated positions, and his reported cash contributions. Principle, it turns out, is a great motivator until a dollar is laid against it.

We’ve had our April Fool’s fun. This post is deadly serious. -Eds.

Some people wonder why others choose to arm themselves in defense of self, home, and family.

It’s a reasonable question, and our (we hope, reasonable) answer is that the roots of self-defense are in personal agency and responsibility. And recent revelations about the way fugitives are pursued, or more honestly, often not pursued, indicate that there’s an epidemic of not arresting violent felons going on.

We call it Conwalking. 

Here it is by the numbers:

Sources of these numbers:

• http://www.usatoday.com/longform/news/nation/2014/03/11/fugitives-next-door/6262719/
• http://cis.

Has some surprising results, which we’ll try to explain.

Just 32 percent of military veterans who served in Iraq or Afghanistan approve of the job Barack Obama is doing as president, according to a new poll from the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation. In a related question, only 42 percent of those surveyed said they believe Obama is a “good commander-in-chief of the military.” Forty eight percent said he is not.

Wait, 32 percent think he’s doing a good job? We wonder how they checked to see that their respondents were actual vets and not homeless guys raving about Agent Orange. Because, really, where did they find these folks? Our guess is deep in the rear echelons of service support. There are so few Obama supporters in SF (active or retired) that everbody in the community knows their names. (Nobody in SF has any problem taking an unpopular or contrarian position, and nobody has a problem with a teammate taking such a position. The handful of liberals we served with were always willing to argue their side and defend its positions in a principled manner — probably why none of them wound up in the media industry). In our experience, the combat arms tend to be more conservative (on national power and military subjects) than the mi

Typical NIBIN workstation, the IBIS scope.

Here’s something that the ATF has done that we all can applaud and support: it honored Allegheny County, PA (think Pittsburgh) for making a 2,500 “hits” in the NIBIN ballistics database.

According to the Federal Law Enforcement Officers’ Association (FLEOA) website FedAgent.com, Pittsburgh SAIC Sam Rabadi of ATF presented a plaque to the county for the county Medical Examiner’s Office’s Firearms and Toolmarks Section near-record “hit count.” A “hit” is a match between an investigational projectile, casing or toolmark, and one in the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN). This lets investigators match recovered guns to unsolved (or solved) crimes, to determine which of multiple shooters fired wou

PowerLine is a mostly political, legal and cultural blog started by three middle-aged lawyers. They manage to keep an interesting balance of stuff, but when they talk about guns, it’s almost always in the legal-case or political context. We were amused to see what we hope is a new feature in the blog, occasional reports from Susan “AmmoGrrl” Vass, who’s an actual comedienne, which is rare, and a funny one, which is vanishingly rare. And a regular shooter, so how rare is that combination?

In any event, she reports on the diversity of her new village in AZ, compared to her old pied-a-terre in Minnesota, which was as white as you might expect (“diverse” people have more sense than to endure -20ºF winters?), including the diversity of the folks in the ammo line. First, though, why’s everybody so happy?

My dusty little village in Arizona is the most diverse place I have ever lived. There’s obviously so much intermarriage that people no longer fit neatly into Census Bureau boxes. But, you’ve

Guam is a strange place. A few years ago, a Congressman was concerned that if more Marines were posted to the island, it might capsize — which says more about the intellects in Congress than it does about the island, we reckon.

This certificate is phony… and it’s $140 more than Guam’s.

But law professor Eugene Volokh has found a place where the old urban myth about “hands and feet registered as deadly weapons” is actually true: the US Territory of Guam. He quotes the statutes (law profs are always doing that!):

Any person who

This picture embiggens, but only to 10% of the actual document’s size. Go to C&Rsenal (links in the text of this post) to get the original.

The impresarios of C&Rsenal have done it again, with a chart that features a to-scale line drawing of every major rifle used in World War I (by the major and minor combatants), complete with a silhouette of a typical 5’7″ rifleman of the period to give scale.

It’s not 100% perfect. For example, you’ll see none of the substitute or obsolete weapons the Russians used, as their ability to produce Mosin-Nagants, and even buy them overseas, was outstripped by the war’s demands for riflemen. But it is a great resource for the historian — or visual checklist for the Great War collector!

The image itself, in all its fifty-million-pixel glory, is here:

For a change, nobody is going anywhere big this Sunday. (That’s coming Wednesday, so we’ll try to preload the blog with stuff for while we’re off pursuing other amusements).

To tease this week, here’s substantive stuff we want to put up:

• Two of the rarest and most desirable US cartridge handguns ever happen to be for sale right now.
• There are some awesome auctions coming up.
• Want to own an M60 machine gun? How about a Hollywood star M60 — the gun that gave Chuck Norris his first big break?
• Want to sit in on a one hour Squad Designated Marksman classroom lecture?
• The Guerrillas of Greece, Part 3, the Greek Civil War, and Part 4, the Cyprus Insurgency.
• Volkssturm carbines, Part 2 of 2.
• 1st Quarter WeaponsMan statistics. How are we doing on our goal of 1,000,000 hits this year without compromising quality?

And of course, we’ll stick up a bunch of non-substantive stuff, too. That’s the price you pay to read the good stuff around here. Hey, it could be worse. We could have ads.

Ah, lucky Week 13. And posted on time on the last day of the week. Will wonders never cease? Not around here, they won’t.

This was a good week spent mostly in the home office. On the phone. Much was accomplished.

In the gun world, our AR prototype receivers came in and are at the FFL for pickup tomorrow. All is proceeding as we have foreseen.

The links to this week’s will all be live when the post goes live. Enjoy!

Our article count was 28, a great rebound from last week’s weak 23. Word count likewise rebounded (or maybe regressed towards the mean), at 19,000 words up from a mere 13,000-odd. We had six posts that broke the long-post threshold of 1,000 words, but none of them were over 2,000. (That’s twice as many long posts as last week, though).

The mean and median post sizes were 679 and 610 respectively, suggesting that there were some unusually short posts. There is usually at least one sub-100-word post, but this time there were three; and 11 total sub-500-word p

What do you get when you take a hokey old TV show about the nation’s most lawless law enforcers, and stretch it to about two hours even? That’s the Jeopardy! Version of a one line review of this movie.

The Untouchables is a 1987 Brian de Palma film so you know it’s going to be soaked in cartooney violence — de Palma doesn’t disappoint (or maybe the correct term is, “doesn’t surprise”) on that expectation. It’s based on the 1959-63 Robert Stack cop show, which is based in turn on the posthumously-published memoir of Elliott Ness, a founding agent of the Prohibition Bureau, the agency that would become today’s ATF. Ness’s book, which we’ve never read (we just ordered a copy to rectify that error) was largely ghostwritten by sportswriter Oscar Fraley, and it launched Fraley on a new career of ghosting G-man tales, inc