Weapons Man

History repeats.

Supercilious Brit Piers Morgan, who escaped from England with the hounds of Scotland Yard on his heels for his participation in the wiretapping culture of England’s crude lower-class tabloid press, finally came to the point of his last show.

Far from regretting his show’s cancellation, due to abysmally low ratings driven in some part by his doomed anti-gun crusade, Morgan doubled down on loathing for America and its gun culture during his last report.

[T]hat’s where I think guns belong – on a military battlefield, in the hands of highly trained men and women fighting for democracy and freedom. Not in the hands of civilians. The scourge of gun violence is a disease that now infects every aspect of American life.  Each day, on average, 35 people in this country are murdered with guns, another 50 kill themselves with guns, and 200 more are shot but

Soldier Systems Daily has one answer. This guy:

“This guy” is COL Robert Mortlock, a guy who hasn’t been with troops in 20 years, and then was a platoon leader in a chemical battalion in Germany. (He did have a company command, but of support troops pampering the caddidiots at West Point). He subsequently became an acquisitions officer, where he’s worked just about exclusively on failed big-ticket programs: several schedule-an-invention missiles, and the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink Future Combat System. These were ill-conceived and badly-managed programs that turned entire 463L pallets of money into vaporware.

Now he’s brought those same skills to bear on the camouflage program, and what we’ve got is a massive, one-size-fits-all, four-hundred-moving-parts boondoggle, with an earmark for every congressional district and a bonus for every beltway bandit, and nothing for the combat troops but another screwing and a chance to go to war in the abominable day-glo ACU.

They alrea

Everybody knows about RPGs — the ubiquitous Russian anti-tank weapon that began as a few improvements to the last few German Panzerfaust antitank grenade launchers, and now are one of the characteristic arms of every war large and small. But the 1950s vintage RPG-2 and its much improved 1960s scion the RPG-7 are long out of date in the service of Russia and its close allies and weapons customers; the last several AT weapons have actually contained the rocket inside the tube in the fashion of western bazookas (or the Panzerfaust’s 1944 competitor, the Panzerschreck). The current AT weapon is the RPG-29 Vampir.

This video purports to be a Syrian rebel attack on Syrian Arab Army T-72M1 tanks using an RPG-29.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=a9e_1360208817

The tank crews are at two very serious disadvantages here. While they’re under direct observation by the rebels (and the rebel videographers), they seem to be without infantry support. We know some tankers, and nothing gives them the heebie-jeebies like being in close terrain full of hostile infantry without any friendly grunts.

The second is that they’ve w

• A bizarre scandal is weighing anchor and setting sail in the Navy. Basic facts: high-ranking intelligence officers in charge of special-access programs (SAPs) arranged to buy suppressors from one of the officers’ brothers, a hot-rod mechanic in California. One of the officials, Lee Hall, is now indicted. (SAPs are very tightly-held classified projects, programs or operations. They have a history of doing amazing things; they also have a history of being exploited by dishonest individuals). And there appear to have been kickbacks all round.

• Here’s a

This year brings the centenary of the War to End All Wars (well, it was a hearwarming concept, if imperfectly executed), and the Allied Powers are celebrating the centenary with events ranging from the silly to the significant to the solemn. We’d put into the “significant” bin the UK National Archives’ plans to release the digitzed (or “digitised,” for the cousins) War Diaries of the British units participating in the war online.

They began, for some reason, with cavalry units.

We have digitised around 1.5 million pages of war diaries so far, and will be releasing them throughout this year as part of First World War 100, our centenary programme. Digitising the most popular segment of one of most popular record series will allow researchers around the world to access the diaries, and has given us the opportunity to embark on a hugely exciting crowdsourcing project, Operation War Diary.

What’s available in the first batch

This first batch of unit war diaries reveals the real-time account of the first three cavalry (WO 95/1096 to WO 95/1156) and the first seven infantry divisions (WO 95/1227 to WO 95/1670) who were part of the first wave of British army troops deployed in France and Flanders. They cover the entire period of the units’ involvement i

The forgotten TV show Hee-Haw was a Hollywood idea of the entertainment country hayseeds might like, and its symbol was a braying jackass. “Yee-Haw” is what we call all the schadenfreude about the indictment of San Francisco anti-gun extremist, and simultaneously, wannabe gun-runner Leland Y. Yee. There’s this, from Yee’s onetime punchbag, the CalGuns Foundation:

Heh. And then there’s the mock business card that’s going around:

The funniest bit of that: it’s all basically true, at least if we believe the 137-page criminal complaint. There are some gems in there, too.

One of the Chinese Tongs with which Yee appears to be associated is named… Hop Sing. We are not making this up,

No, not as a guy dressed in drag. (The mistaken pronouns in the excerpt from Politico hack Tal Kopan below have been corrected; as long as he’s got a Y Chromosome, let along male reproductive tackle, he’s a guy, and Leavenworth isn’t going to schedule his whackadickoffomy any time soon). He’s appealing his conviction, because he’s all confused and suchlike.

Other than that, he’s enjoying life in prison. Some places, a guy who wants to be a girl is guaranteed a certain popularity.

The inept Kopan, who seems not to have registered the outcome of the trial and the terms of Manning’s sentence, also refers to the prisoner as PFC Manning, although he, she or it (Kopan, whose sex we don’t know) gets his, her or its (Manning’s, whose sex we know but Manning doesn’t) abbreviation as well as rank wrong. For you see, Manning is not a PFC, having been reduced to the lowest enlisted grade as a result of his court-martial conviction and sentence. This is an impor

This is an excellent video of three BASE jumpers who sneaked into the Freedom Tower (the asymmetrical architectural abortion that is replacing the Twin Towers at the glacial pace of Bloomberg-era NYC) and parachuted off September 30th. We’ve cued up the video to two minutes in, so you’ll miss most of the nerving-up phase and only see the last half minute and the actual jumps.

The jumps were seen by Port Authority brass as deeply insulting, but Port Authority police, who failed to secure the site — the jumpers came through a hole in the fence that had been plugged for weeks by a loose canvas tarp — didn’t have the investigative ability to determine who the jumpers were. The case was assigned to the NYPD, and New York police and prosecutors dropped dozens of violent-crime investigations cold in a Javertesque quest to nail the jumpers.

In the end, pervasive surveillance and unlimited police manpower bagged the jumpers, when the identity of every car moving in the area that night was investigated, uncovering the jumpers’ pick-up ride.

Once the three jumpers and their lookout 

He isn’t smiling now, even though he got a bail deal that an ordinary citizen would never see.

Gun trafficking, and corruption. You couldn’t make this stuff up.

[California State Senator Leland] Yee was shackled at the ankles when he appeared in court Wednesday afternoon with 19 other defendants. His demeanor was downcast, and he looked nervously into the packed gallery.

Awwww. Sucks to be him, right?

Yee was charged with six counts of depriving the public of honest services and one count of conspiracy to traffic in guns without a license. If convicted on all the counts, he faces up to 125 years in prison.

The gun charges alone are good for 20 years — longer than Yee believes murderers should do. (We’re seeing a glimmer of rationality in his inmate advocady over the years). The trafficking charges involve guns, yes, but Yee

The Bureau of Prisons does a nice sideline selling uniforms and equipment to the military. Federal Prison Industries actually has its own trademark: UNICOR™. UNICOR made stuff includes Army uniforms, web gear, rucksacks, and various other odds and ends.

The prison administrators say that it not only earns the BOP money, but that inmates who work (for pennies an hour) for FPI/Unicor are less likely to cause trouble in prison, or to bounce back once they get released. (Whether this represents causation, or just that FPI is selective about which prisoners get jobs, can’t be determined).

By statute, FPI is restricted to selling its products to the Federal Government. Its principal customer is the Department of Defense, from which FPI derives approximately 53% of its sales. Other key customers include the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Transportation, the Treasury, Agriculture, and Veterans Affairs; the General Services Administration, Social Security Administration, U.S. Postal Service, and the Federal Bureau of Pr

Nazis: beastly but fascinating. They caused the second most trouble and death of any revolutionaries in history (the Communists have pretty much retired that trophy for all time). They spread their evil ideology from the Pyrenees to the Caucusus. And, what’s probably the biggest source of their appeal, they had spiffy uniforms (with a tip of black hat to Hugo Boss) and terriffic Teutonic technology.

But not all their technology was world-class. As the war ground on, the Third Reich’s foothold in Europe contracted under the relentless pressure of the USSR in the East and the US and UK in the West and South, not to mention a wide range of national resistance movements and a bothersome strategic bombing campaign. Hermann Göring had planned that Operation Barbarossa would deliver the machine tools and industrial raw materials of the vast Soviet factories into his hands; instead, the Russians’ rapid dismantling and displacement of industry — tools, fixtures, workers, and all — left him empty-handed. The new war

The Firearm Blog is an excellent place to get gun news, often news that is buried on other sites or that just isn’t found anywhere else. That’s no secret to us: search Google for “the firearm blog” site:weaponsman.com and you’ll get over 100 hits, six or seven pages of them, most of those mentions being where we give Steve Johnson and his gang credit for stories we found there.

Sometimes we pass the story on. Sometimes we develop it further. Sometimes we disagree with what Steve and his writers have written, but those seven pages of Google hits tell us we keep coming back to Steve and his guys (and at least one gal, Annette Wachter).

You should, too.

Here’s what’s on there today, just on the front page:

• A manufacturer’s release of night sights for the compact Glock 42. Tritium is your friend, although these are apparen

Eugene Volokh blogs about an interesting case in Illinois. It is a suit by a couple whose house was invaded in a warrantless raide by the Illinois State Police, and their guns seized (and held for 18 months, until a court in this case forced their return), on the pretext that the husband was “mentally ill” for expressing pro-Second-Amendment ideas. The decision at this point is: can the case go forward, or can the oathbreaker cops (State Police Lieutenant Coffman and Officers Pryor and Summers, and head of the State Police Grau) have it dismissed? The court let the case against the anti-gun officers as individuals go forward, but dismissed the charges against Grau (in his official capacity), and dismissed a challenge to the constitutionality of the law “on its face.”

Here’s the legal opinion (.pdf) and here’s Professor Volokh’s post, which mostly quotes from the opinion except for the very useful reminder, at least to us nonlawyers, that in motion-to-dismiss stage, the c

PopMech has a look at rail safety (hat tip, Glenn Reynolds), that reveals just how many people perish in rail accidents — mostly fools who stray onto the tracks — every year. It is instructive to compare train fatalities, which are thought by most people to be rare and exceptional, and accidental gun fatalities, which are widely described as commonplace. First, to the trains:

“Statistically, every 94 minutes something or someone is getting hit by a train in the United States,” says David Rangel, deputy director of Modoc Railroad, a training school for future train engineers. Now, most of those incidents dont involve people—Rangel’s statistic also includes the occasional abandoned shopping cart, wayward livestock, and other objects that somehow find their way onto the tracks. But, according to the Federal Railroad Administration FRA, 784 people were kil

Rick Shinseki is the ineffectual and unsatisfactory Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs. He’s been in Congress a lot the last couple of weeks, and he’s pretty much been a punchbag for both Senators and Congressmen, and both Democrats and Republicans, because of various mis-, mal-, and non-feasance on his watch. So last week was a pretty bad week for ol’ Rick.

It isn’t the scandals so much as the parade of VA bigs lying about them that has the pols’ noses out of joint. It’s impossible to list everything the VA has screwed up lately, but here’s a few high points.

• The VA has a budget of $164 Billion, but can’t begin to account for where it all goes. Hang on, you’re going to see a couple of the places the money gets spent. Hint: not on veterans.

• About $100 milli

Dannel Malloy, the peace-love-dope-child governor of the state of Connecticut, has said from time to time that his priority is to create jobs. And he’s finally done it! Props to the Great Man. Of course, the jobs he’s created are in South Carolina, as Connecticut businesses flee the tax, regulatory and legal environment he’s created. This is especially true of gun companies — the only one paying lip service to staying in CT is Colt, and they’re expanding out of state.

One Connecticut company reached a milestone on Monday, with the first PTR-91 receiver to be manufactured in South Carolina and engraved with PTR’s new home, “Aynor, SC.”

[PTR Industries purchasing manager Bob] Grabowski gave WMBF News a behind-the-scenes tour Monday to

About 90% of what is taught in public schools is crap. In Illinois, that rises to a higher percentage. A workbook assignment on the Bill of Rights teaches that the 2nd Amendment protects your right to the guns the government lets you have and register.

“My son was given a workbook at school that is a compilation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. When they covered the 2nd Amendment, he saw that they were stating that only ‘certain guns’ could be owned and that they had to be ‘registered,’ which he knew was false,” the parent said. “He bought this to my attention as he felt it was wrong to teach these things that aren’t true. I’m extremely proud of my son for his actions.”

“Me and my children are active gun enthusiasts and supporters of the 2nd amendment. I have discussed the 2nd amendment with them several times and explained what it meant and its importance to our country.”

While the parent confronted several school administrators, the workbook is likely to stay in circulation for young students across the state.

Over at GunLab, Chuck is hard at work on two projects. The first of them is the VG 1-5 Replica. (Did you know that Hitler himself supposedly rejected this gun for manufacture? We hope to have that document for you this week). The VG 1-5 is a technically very interesting Gustloff-Werke design that used the common (then) MP44 magazine, in a crude, stamped-and-welded, semi-auto carbine. There are now completed and partly-completed parts for much of the first batch, and Chuck is thinking Job #1 is 60 days from reality (not sure if he will submit that to ATF Firearms Technology Branch, or if he has submitted a prototype already and received  a letter of determination). This picture shows a VG repro shaping up, with a reinforcement plate test-fit on the receiver halves, with a complete gun above as a sample:

The images should embiggen with a click.

The second project is something near and dear to Chuck himself: a reproduction Japanese Type 99 light machine gun magazine. To press the magazine halves, he must manufactu

… here’s what they haven’t been watching:

• The civil war in Syria, which is a total mess, thanks in part to our Smart Diplomacy™ led by our C-minus Secretary of State. If you’ll remember, we were against the rebels when some of them were secular freedom-lovers, and tilted towards Boy Assad. Then, we were for the rebels, once Boy Assad had cleaned those guys out and the only rebels that were left in quantity were extremist Islamists. The ones that are left range from Hamas clones at the most reasonable, to savages one step up from cannibalism at the least. But Boy Assad was so weakened that his hollow army has been replaced by a coalition of Hezbollah terrorists and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps mercenaries. The defeated? The people of Syria itself, except for the relatively small number who have escaped to newly built, enormous refugee camps in what has always been the most stable nation in the region, Jordan. 150,000 Syrians are dead (mostly civilians).  Ann Barnard notes in the NY Times:

The government bombards neighborhoods with explosi

Thomas Michael Barrett, Jailhouse lawyer (literally).

Hot tip: if some scroungy guy offers to sell you guns out of his trunk, he’s probably one of “ATF’s Finest” — a criminal working with the agency to make new first-time felons. A Wisconsin man is now about to be a literal jailhouse lawyer because he didn’t listen to his own sense that there was “something funny” about the convicted drug dealer who was insisting he buy the guns.

A jury found a Wauwatosa lawyer guilty Friday of buying what he called “a hit man’s gun” with a “highly, highly, highly illegal” silencer during an undercover reverse sting in 2011.

Thomas Michael Barrett had been set up by a convicted drug dealer who was trying to earn a break on his sentencing in federal court. But despite his own testimony that he sensed something was funny about a meeting for the possible sale,