Weapons Man

(Yeah, it’s Thursday. We spent all day Wednesday on planes. Line up for refunds at the refund counter).

This will be the soul of brevity, because it’s really simple. The site, NFA Tracker, is a crowdsourced source of information on how long National Firearms Act registration and transfer approvals are taking.

The NFA is the 1934 act which burdens the possession and transfer of “gangster” weapons: machine guns, short-barreled rifles, and silencers, among others. Each weapon requires a $200 transfer tax every time it changes hand, which was meant, in 1934, as a Pigovian tax that would so burden possession of these firearms as to deter it entirely. Exactly 80 years later, the burden is less a financial one, than one of inconvenience and delay: two hundred 2,014 dollars are a mere fraction of their 1934 ancestors; $200 in 1934 is equivalent to $3,500 today (according to the inflation calculator

A Glock 22 Gen 4 with a Streamlight light attached. (File photo from ar15.com). Missing pistol is similar.

A Tucson cop is asking that question as an important piece of personal equipment turned up missing last week, after he chased a purse-snatcher on foot. The cops bagged the criminal — one Adrian Pride, who’s a career criminal despite being only 18 — after a long and kinetic steeplechase through back yards and over fences and walls. But one of the officers was Glockless as Pride was being read his rights. The Arizona Star:

A Tucson police officer chasing a man in connection with a theft and purse-snatching on the city’s westside discovered that he lost his handgun during the pursuit.

The .40-caliber Glock, which fell out of the officer’s holster, was not found Monday, and police are asking the public for help in finding it, sai

Prevents furniture scratching too. Is there anything it can’t do?

In this case, in industrial Youngstown, Ohio.

The 89-year-old woman is being treated at St. Elizabeth Health Center after police found her about 11:35 a.m. Tuesday after they were called to check on her welfare.

Officers called to the home in the 100 block of South Maryland Avenue noticed a door kicked in. They waited for other officers to arrive to seal the house to keep anyone inside from getting out before going in, reports said.

Officers got inside and identified themselves before coming to a door that was tied to another door by duct tape and an electrical cord, reports said. When police asked if someone was inside, an elderly woman answered, reports said.

Police then forced the door open and found the woman in her bedroom.

The woman told police that a man had broken into her home sometime late Sunday around midnight and h

It was the slightly misleading title: “IDF Combat Motivation Steady at 74.7%” — that drew us to this article at Israel National News. it turns out it doesn’t measure “combat motivation,” whatever that is. What it measures is the willingness of draftees to join combat units.

One thing we learned from it is that Israeli news reporters are not any more numerate than their American cousins. Another is that an Israeli soldier, too, gets a “dream sheet,” and the IDF, like any other army, figures it’s pleased him if he gets into one of his top three requests.

The motivation of draftees to serve in combat units appears to have stabilized at 74.7%, after hitting a record high of almost 80% in 2011, and then dipping to 72% in 2012. The number measures the proportion of fresh draftees who want to serve in combat units, out of all the draftees who are eligible for such units.

It looks a little different when a bullet slams into metal at 2500-3000 fps, and is caught on video at a million frame-per-second equivalent (the other fps).

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The euro 1980s beep-and-bang music may not be to your taste, but these pictures are intriguing from both artistic and scientific points of view. The spalling from metal sheet and plate has to be seen to be believed.

There are a few more videos on the website of the company whose technology appears to have been used to make this one: Kurzzeit.de. The uploader of the video also has a few other high-speed videos, but nothing at a millions frames a second.

The Oscar Pistorius trial is stumbling along in the sort of shambolic, not-quite-dysfunctional but not-quite-fuctional-either way that has come to characterize South African institutions since the end of apartheid. One is reminded of the old ZA joke:

Q: what’s the difference between Zimbabwe and South Africa?

A: about five years.

But South African institutions, including the police and the courts, are doing what they can to try to stem the decline into typical-African-kleptocracy. In the Pistorius trial, the popular Paralympic sprinter is charged with the murder of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp, and is using a rather flimsy self-defense-gone-wrong defense.

South African laws have a few points of commonality with those in the United States. Self-defense is an affirmative defense to homicide charges, for example, and judges have rather a lot of power in the courtroom (more than American judges, it seems).

Our usual Self-Defense wizard, Andrew Branca, isn’t live-blogging this, but there are plenty of media reports, which probably provide more Pistorius trial than any of us want. For example, South Africa media site The SOWETAN has been live-blogging the case

Murderer and would-be cop killer Marlon Oswaldo Gudiel Polanco, 32

Just undocumented murderers murdering the people Americans won’t do. Nothing else to see here. (Of course, the victims may have been undocumented, too — except for the wounded cop).

One of the many indignities heaped upon undocumented workers is that Federal Form 4473 warns them, and the Criminal Code enjoins them, that you can’t buy a gun in this country without at least a green card. Not legally anyway. But still, the criminalien undocumented welfare collectors unskilled laborers manage to get up to mischief anyway.

A Fairfax County man was stabbed and killed and woman was wounded Thursday morning at an apartment complex in Seven Corners, county author

Hey, the military’s being cut, there are bugouts happening worldwide, the Air Force is flying fighters that are about 10 years past their fatigue life, but hey, our forces have conquered something much more important: with the end of DADT, they can now put on a drag show.

Navy Lt. Marissa Greene told Stars and Stripes she only expected to sell 75 tickets for the variety show, but ended up selling more than 400 in ten days. The event went through the same approval process as other on-base fundraisers go through, with the only caveat being that it was not allowed to be labeled a “drag show” in its publicity materials. The show was warmly received by spectators, who rocked out to performances by the likes of Manny Nuff and Chocolate Sunrise (“a crowd favorite,” the website notes.)

via Gay and lesbian troops perform in drag on American military base – The Week.

There’s video at the link. We didn’t watch it — we’re not sure we have enough brain bleach on hand. We’re not sure there is enough brain bleach.

We are superannuated, and caught between the Scylla of “It

The DD Mk18 Upper is used by US SOF.

Most firearms manufacturers treat what’s going on inside their plants as if they were Lockheed’s Skunk Works: everything is a secret, it’s a big secret, you can’t see it, and bedamned if we’ll let you see a picture of it.

Now, the real secret is, most of the arcane knowledge that goes into the manufacture is what technologists call “tribal knowledge”: it’s the sort of thing that’s passed on by word-of-mouth, by hands-on action, by doing, and seeing, and doing again until it’s perfectly right. Before the rarefied academic term “tribal knowledge” came down the pike, we used to call this “know-how.”

Masked man at the scene of the crime…

That used to be a joke. Jeremy Oneail, a special effects artist in New Hampshire, used to quip that the people who bought his realistic masks “could pay for them in one heist” —  by using them in robberies.

Until one did.

It turned out not to be a very good idea. The FBI tracked the mask to an eBay ad, and then back to Oneail’s shop. They asked him for help. And his sales records made it easy for him to answer that age-old question: “Who is that masked man?” He gave the answer to the special agents, and they took it from there.

Oneail, 41, owns and operates Oneail FX Studios in the basement of the Goffstown home he shares with his fiancee. Over the past year, he started concentrating on custom-designed, lifelike silicone masks, which he sells on eBay.

After he designed a mask for a theme park in Mumbai, India, last year, Onea

Just about anything can kill a human being cold graveyard dead. In young Anthony Takacs’s case, last month, it was a State of Maine snowplow.

Police say the driver of a car lost control on a slippery hill on Western Avenue at about 9 p.m. Wednesday. It was snowing at the time. Trooper Douglas Franklin the car crossed the center line and struck the plow, despite efforts by the plow driver to move out of the way.

WZON-AM says the driver of the car was identified as 24-year-old Anthony Takacs. A female passenger suffered minor injuries. The plow driver was unhurt.

via Driver dead after crash with Maine state snowplow | SeacoastOnline.com.

In the warmer parts of the country, the various ways the winter can kill you in the northern end of the temperate zone, are not the same kind of factor a factor. But in our part of the country, they are; the winter is hostile if you are not prepared, cruelly neutral if you are. So all winter long, we’re barraged with stories about fatal skids, frostbite, hypothermia, exposure, etc. Not to mention the ever-popular myocardial infarction while snow shoveling.

Meanwhile most of these skid, frost, freeze, exposure, and heart attack victims have

For today’s psychologists, at least the “pop” variety, today’s psychological casualties (like the suicides we discussed a bit last Friday) are a Baby Duck world: everything is new, and nothing has come before all these novelties. This stakes a claim to a certain diagnostic power that today’s pshrinks almost certainly have not got, and at the same time, neglects a body of literature of war centuries, even millennia, old. In those old times, men as smart as we are today, and unconstrained by the straitjacket of today’s psychiatric constructs, wrestled with much the same problems.

The literature of the First World War is experiencing a small bloom of appreciation, on the centennial of that conflict that imbrued a continent and decimated a generation (indeed, more than “decimated,” with that word’s ancient meaning of the slaying of

Russian quad-column AK-74 magazine, now up on GunBroker.

Would you buy an AK mag for $1200? What if it’s a rare AK mag? What if stuff imported from Russia might be about to become very difficult to find, due to sanctions? This magazine on GunBroker for a cool $1,199.00 is a rare, current-issue four-column 5.45mm magazine. The magazine is historically and militarily significant, because it is a type that introduced three originally-foreign technologies into Russia’s venerable infantry rifle:

1. Stripper-based mag refilling, as has been standard on the M-16 for decades;
2. Four column magazine, first made popular by the Finnish Suomi and later by the Swedish M45 submachineguns, and currently made in 60- and 100-round capacities for the AR by Surefire; and,
3. Modern injection-molded polymer manufacturing, unlike th

Running around in circles like the old Marine chant: “Green side out, brown side out, run in circles, scream and shout!” which dates back to the old World War II camouflage that had green and brown blotches on opposite sides of the material. Things like jackets were always green side out, as far as I’ve seen, but the helmet cover was reversible.

The Army issued, in the 60s and 70s, a helmet cover with an interesting forest pattern we’ve never seen used on anything but helmet covers.

That’s the subtext from this message of advice from Dawn Coulter, of the defense finance and accounting service. If you have a DOD MyPay account, this has probably been sent to you already. If you haven’t, here it is.

Beware of fake SmartDocs e-mail.

Recently some myPay users received a fake e-mail asking for the answers to myPay security questions. You should NEVER share the answers to your myPay security questions with anyone. The Defense Finance and Accounting Service, myPay, or SmartDocs will never ask you for this information. By sharing the answers to your myPay security questions you may allow someone to access your myPay account.

What should I do if I responded to this e-mail request?

The fake SmartDocs e-mails came from smartdocs@dfas-mil.org and smartdocs@dfas.mil.org. If you responded to this e-mail request with the answers to your myPay security questions, please log into myPay and change your security questions immediately.

What should I do if I receiv

Work has gone a bit nonlinear and the docs weren’t as finished as we thought. We’re catching up. Keep your eye on the blog (or the RSS feed) for updates. Next week promises to be even busier (we’re not sure if that’s better or worse) with some time periods off-net.

This Colt AR-15 Model 601 might have been the very one tested by American Rifleman. It’s Serial Number 000115. (The stocks once wore green paint over the brown fiberglass). And yes, the picture embiggens.

The political news website The Daily Caller has an interesting reprint of the American Rifleman’s initial, 1962, review of the AR-15 rifle. Nowadays, ARs are extremely common, and most of the people who shoot them, for business or for pleasure, weren’t reading American Rifleman in 1962. In fact, most of them weren’t alive 52 years ago. So if you’re one of those Johnny-come-latelies, or if you’ve not and misplaced your copy in the last half-century, here’s a snippet<

Now, this guy is one of thos porcupiney libertoons who does make things hard for himself. For crying out loud, his blog is “The Daily Anarchist,” like he’s Sacco and Vanzetti or something. But he did experience something new-to-us in the endless parade of stupidity from the braindead functionaries of the TSA. They searched his bags, thoroughly and repeatedly, for Bitcoins.

That’s kind of like… we dunno. Searching your bags for hyperlinks. Bitcoins are a virtual digital currency and they have no physical manifestation. Somebody got these mouth-breathing junior G-Men hyped up about Bitcoin without telling them that, well, they’re not actual coins like a quarter or a dime. They’re just an idea. 

Then again, maybe it’s better they weren’t told that… they might have cut the top off his skull to look for ideas.

[T]he orange shirt said, “What about Bitcoin?” I was flabbergasted. This was above and beyond any scrutiny I had ever received from the TSA, and a little frightening that they were looking for Bitcoin. I said I didn’t understand the question. He continued, “We saw Bitcoin in your bag and need to check.” I was incredulous, and asked, “Do you have a superior officer because I don’t think you know what you’re talking abou

Horacia Simeus, the latest in a long list of PBC machete murder victims. RIP.

This is a Florida crime that will not produce tut-tutting talking heads on TV. In fact, the blow-dried blowflies of Manhattan news studios couldn’t care less: this case has a black guy killing a black girl, so it can’t advance any of their cherished man-bites-dog racial narratives.

Horacia Simeus was pregnant, by entirely the wrong guy. Bad luck. And she believed in “Romeo and Juliet kind of love,” worse luck. But the worst luck of all was that she invested all that love in her boyfriend, a career criminal, who wasn’t exactly Dad O The Year material.

The state attorney’s victim advocate was on the phone with Horacia trying to renew her restraining order when once again, the effective range of a restraining order was proven to be zero meters. Youvens Madeus hacked her to death with a machete.

How simple? How ’bout, they’re recruiting suicidal and insane civilians into the Army. The whole PTSD-as-cause thing was always bullshit, but it turns out that the real cause was as simple as accepting lots of people with mental problems already. 

1-in-5 new recruits to the Army had mental problems before they enlisted and that 1-in-10 had contemplated suicide before they joined.

“Some of the differences in disorder rates are truly remarkable,” said Ronald Kessler, McNeil Family Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School and senior author of the paper on mental disorder prevalence. “The rate of major depression is five times as high among soldiers as civilians, intermittent explosive disorder six times as high, and PTSD nearly 15 times as high.”

Nearly 60 percent of solider suicide attempts were traced to pre-enlistment mental disorders, which are acutely more common among non-deployed U.S. Army soldiers than demographically similar portions of the general population, according to the study.

Well, si