Weapons Man

The Associated (with Terrorists) Press took a few videos of Lenin statues biting the dust in Ukraine this February and edited them together. “Raz, dva!” (“One, two!”) Craaaaash!

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. (Well, Stalin, but we think any statues to him didn’t survive Ukrainian independence).

From the comments at YouTube:

[W]e got rid of Lenins statues in Georgia even before USSR was dissolved, clearly Ukraine is on the right track.

and…

The shackles have been broken, the people are freed, and Ukraine will NEVER go back in Putin’s lap! God bless the free people of Ukraine. FUCK PUTIN!

and..

What is STUNNING is that, in 2014, statues of this monster were (and are) still standing ANYWHERE in Ukraine. What in God’s name TOOK so long?

Of course, it is YouTube, so there are a lot of dumbass, retarded, and bigoted comments, too.

Ukraine is not out of the woods. Clearly Yanukovych’s (and therefore Putin’s, because Y never ha

Can’t they both lose? (Morgan and 9-11 Twoofer Alex Jones).

And it’s his monomania about the gun issue as much as his sub-basement ratings that showed him the door, he realizes:

“Look, I am a British guy debating American cultural issues, including guns, which has been very polarizing, and there is no doubt that there are many in the audience who are tired of me banging on about it,” he said. “That’s run its course and Jeff and I have been talking for some time about different ways of using me.”

Not for the first time, we disagree with Piers. For “many in the audience” to be “tired of him”, it would have to be many in the audience. And that’s pretty much the problem, isn’t it?

Although a change has long been rumored, it was the first time that both he, and the CNN executives I talked to, acknowledg

The Institute of Military Technology (the museum that spun off from Reed Knight’s amazing collection) has produced this video on the BAR, which includes some period training film and slide footage, Reed Knight himself going over the mechanism, and… best of all! Live fire.

We may be limited in what we can write this week (especially first half…) and we owe you TW3s for the last two weeks. And last week’s Saturday Matinee. Arrgggh, that’s all we can say to that right now. And that we’ll let you know when the backdated stuff goes up. In the meantime, enjoy the BAR.

Real world deadlines this week. Posting may be slow and thin. We regret the inconvenience, but thought best to warn you ahead. We will try to get one post per day up.

Piers Morgan’s TV show is not dead yet, but to steal a line from a much better-received English import, it’s “Pining for the Fjords.” Several Hollyweird outlets have noted that Piers’s never-robust (how about, always-sucky?) ratings have tailed off. In fact, they’ve moved beyond “sucky” through “Electrolux” to “danger, turbine intake.”

It took Rick Kissell of the granddaddy of Hollyweird dope sheets, Variety, to ask: is it because of his attacks on American gun ownership? Kissell examines the probabilities:

In the end, are guns what killed CNN’s “Piers Morgan Live”?

The show, hosted by anti-gun crusader Morgan, continues to struggle in the Nielsens. And this month, the start of the Michael Dunn loud-music murder trial in Florida has put the issue of gun control back in the forefront. February

A sharp and bloody civil war is raging in Ukraine, a war with ethnic, linguistic, political, and other roots in a deeply divided society. But you know why the civil war is bad? If you read the American press, it’s because of the guns. Gee, why didn’t we think of that!

The press is true to its antigun ethos, with one reporter arguing in a tweet that “protesters using firearms in Kiev” were “Horrible tactics – practically begging for a military crackdown.” Max Fisher’s “bitch had it coming” analysis of the protests tweet linked to this New York Times story, which also blames the protesters, not the police that are gunning them down:

“There will be many dead today,” Anatoly Volk, 38, one of the demonstrators, said. He was watching stretchers carry dead and wounded men down a stairway slick wit

This is a subject of great interest to all of us who carry in self-defense, because what Dunn done wrong came around and done Dunn wrong in the end. He’s almost certainly going to die in prison, and he didn’t have to. Somewhere along the way some bad ideas took root in his head; perhaps he got some bad advice. But on the day he chose to defend himself with a gun he did a lot of things wrong. Some of them could have gotten him and his then-fiancee killed, if he’d really been in the high-threat situation he thought he was in (giving his testimony the benefit of all doubt).

When you go armed, you ought to have a quiet confidence about you, not a bullyrag swagger. Believe it or not, criminals can pick up on this, and they will leave somebody like you alone.

Don’t react to a small man with a big mouth. The mouthy guy is seldom a true threat, even in front of his peers. Ignore him; don’t let him get your goat.

You are not the world’s Punk Kid Policeman. Even re

Those university professors… they’re a dangerous bunch and bear considerable watching. This guy received his PhD a couple of years ago, and was teaching at the University of New Hampshire. “Communications,” which, as it turns out, does not need to involve batteries, a #$&$(!! hand-cranked generator, cutting antennae to 1/2 or 1/4 wavelength, or satellites. At least, when one is merely “professing” it. All it requires is one certified bat guano crazy professor. And the trope is that the scientists are mad. As if.

According to multiple news reports, [Eric] Engel of Durham [NH]  was wanted in the shooting death of Aleksander Wysocki, 74, on Friday morning in Cary, N.C. According to the Cary Police Department, officers responded to a report of a resident hearing a gunshot and when they arrived on scene they found Wysocki in his side yard around 8:45 a.m. Friday.

Wysocki was rushed to Duke University Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead, police said.

The Marion County Sheriff&#8

A reader flagged John Richardson to the possibility that Remington’s insistence that all Ilion jobs will stay in Ilion, may be due to provisions in the agreement with United Mine Workers Local 717. John notes:

I was able to look at an earlier collective bargaining agreement between Local 717 and Remington. While I did not find successor language in it, I did see language that mandated certain models produced by Remington must be made in Ilion. Article II- Scope and Coverage, Section g – Job Security says that products such as the Remington Model 7, 700, 7400, and 7600 rifles and the Remington Model 870, 1100, and 1187 shotguns “will continued to be produced only at the Ilion plant”. It did allow for Remington to procure component parts elsewhere. This contract expired in 2007 and I can’t imagine succeeding contracts not containing similar language.

via

The Firearm Blog is reporting that LWRC, which has only just been reported to be up for sale, is already committed to a purchaser — Colt.

We wrote back in August that Colt was looking at a Florida location, in unincorporated Osceola County land near Kissimmee. We’ve since heard rumors that Colt has let their option run out on that facility, and writers who are anti-gun (or opposed to Florida’s Governor) have been bemoaning the failure of the deal and the waste of Florida incentives, but Colt

It all started with a thread on a forum called Snipers’ Hide… but wait, it didn’t really, because Tactical (that word again) Rifles (website, tacticalrifles.net) and Sniper’s Hide go way back, kind of like Njal and Gunnar in Njal’s Saga. The thread contained this video. Be forewarned, it’s 11 minutes of purest gunsmithing fail:

To put this in perspective, Tactical Rifles charges thousands for one of these rifles. Many thousands. And that one was so jacked up a real gunsmith ran up an additional $1,500 or so fixing it (Some of which he rebated, because he felt so bad for the poor throg who got stuck with it).

Once the video was posted on that thread, a shill for TR — a bozo who cannot string together a simple declarative sentence without more spelling and grammar errors than he has fingers to count them on, jumped on to that thread to suggest that the buyer of that rifle, Jeff, or the distinctly non-bubba smith in the video, Marc Soulie, deliberately sabotaged the rifle.

Biathlon is the nearest thing going to combat training! It’s strenuous endurance activity, with an abrupt transition to precision rifle shooting, and an abrupt transition back to endurance again. Its combat utility is no accident, as it started off (and continues, under different rules) as a military sport. Indeed, the US Army National Guard runs a biathlon center to this day at CEATS  site at Camp Ethan Allen, Vermont.

Its interesting to see how the biathletes handle their marksmanship. Here are the tactics you can observe in the Olympic coverage- and remember that they are firing under significant physical stress:

Biathletes attach an arm cuff to their sling on the firing range for extra stability
Support hand wrapped into top of sling
Breath control- distinctive breath in before every trigger press
Once initiated, consistent trigger press until shot breaks
Mental focus is the doorway to relaxing the body
It’s a good view of techniques to incorporate into your own training – especially if you want to be at your best under serious stress.

via Rifle a

By Bloomberg logic, if you have a hammer on your workbench you’re as guilty as this schmo. We have about nine different hammers; is than an “arsenal”?

Cripes. How many times is this?

Saturday morning, officers arrested Vinayak Shanbhag after the son told his mother he had pummeled the elder Shanbhag repeatedly on the head with a 10-pound sledgehammer while the father slept. Vinayak Shanbhag later told police that he and his father had been “playing puzzles” and his father made a remark that bothered him. The suspect said he thought about the remark all night and decided to attack his father, an arrest report shows. Police who responded to the residence on Unabelle Drive discovered a grisly scene where even the bedroom walls were “covered in blood.”

Barker said the suspect has a history of mental illness and being violent to other family membe

The political suits are fond of Vice Admiral Michael Rogers, Organizing for America’s nominee for Director of the National Security Agency, and honcho of US Cybet Command. So the fact that Rogers was asleep at the switch as Navy Chief of Cybersecurity probably isn’t going to be held against him. On his watch, Iranian hackers came to the Navy and Marine Corps Internet (NMCI) and stayed for four months, according to the Wall Street Journal. (Try this link if that one is paywalled, and if that doesn’t work google Iranian Hack

The National Shooting Sports Foundation frequrently offers tips and advice to dealers in complying with the letter and spirit of Federal Firearms Laws and ATF’s implementing Regulations. As much as we may want some of these laws and rules changed, as long as they are on the books we have a duty to obey them.

There is no question that some of these rules, such as the prohibition on firearms sales to felons and persons under indictment, make it harder for criminals to do what they do. Being thinking beings (we didn’t say “brilliant,” just “thinking”), they can be remarkably cunning about getting around limitations. For example, at least one of the guns used by a local small-time drug dealer to kill the beloved police chief of the next town over, wound four DTF cops, and kill his girlfriend and himself, was bought for him by the girlfriend, who passed the NICS check that he would have failed. There are more lessons in that than “don’t let your daughters date felons” (although that’s a pretty good one, you’ve gotta admit).

Hey, here’s another cool Russian website, found thanks to Forgotten Weapons’ commenter Daweo. The title means, “Weapons Exotica”. Author Alexander Raigorodetskiy is a Russian (duh) writer with two interests — the sort of exotic and off-center weapons that the Forgotten Weapons readership thrives on, and aviation, especially inter-war aviation, where his interests likewise go to exotica, prototypes, and drawing-board dreams.

He has also published two books: Anti-tank Weapons and their Derivatives, and Hybrid Jet Aircraft: At the Change of Epochs, which are available as free .pdf downloads from several links at this page (yes, the lin

There’s a term of art in law that comes up from time to time, for example in deciding when official behavior is bad enough to eliminate qualified immunity. They say behavior that bad “shocks the conscience.” As you might imagine, that is a very high bar, and almost no misconduct clears it. But the fact is, as bad as official corruption is these days, official peccadilloes are not what’s conscience-shocking. For example, yesterday’s terrified cop gut-shooting a dog was pretty bad, but it didn’t “shock the conscience.” It was just one more failure by one more set of payroll patriots. Nope, to “shock the conscience” is the everyday activity of your usual, boring and banal exemplars of the criminal class. Case in point:

Authorities in Northern California said Tuesday that a woman and her boyfriend charged with killing her 3-year-old daughter stored the girl’s body in a suitcase and inside a freezer.

Sara Krueger and her boyfriend, Ryan Scott Warner both of Napa, put little Kayleigh Slusher’s body