Weapons Man

Probably the most critical task in any organization is personnel selection and assessment. High-functioning organizations have formal selection gates that select personnel who will be able to perform at the desired level, and ongoing assessment procedures that will, among other things, identify nonperformers and separate them.

Of course, we’re thinking of special operations units, but selection and assessment have been employed before by civilian organizations with resounding success. We’ll have an example after the video. For now, have a look at a failure of personnel selection and assessment. Yeah, it’s another quivering-coward-shoots-a-dog video:

This officer, Tarek Hassani, is clearly badly suited for his job, due to cowardice. Cowards abound, they’re a fact of human life, because courage is a trait like many others that’s distributed on a curve. Guys like Bud Day are on one tail of the bell curve; guys like Tarek Hassani are on the other; most of us cluster in the middle somewhere. Somewhere out on that left tail of the bell curve, long before we get to Hassani, is a cut-off (“we know it when we see it” but probably about 2

The turnstiles have been still since a Chrysler successor shuttered this auto-electronics plant in 2010.

More hard reporting is coming out on the Remington plant in Alabama. It’s a former Chrysler plant (it made radios for Chrysler cars) that was a space and missile plant (making electronics for a Chrysler subsidiary) before that. After it’s reworked for Remington, which may take over a year, it will be able to produce many of Remington Outdoor Company’s products on many lines. (ROC is the holding company formerly known as Freedom Group. This is looking more and more like a setup for an IPO in 2015 or 2016).

The key takeaways: Remington is denying that the SAFE Act was a major factor, and denying that any jobs in New York will be transferred or cut. The plant will

Of course, the man in question didn’t think he was in any fight, let alone a gun fight. He was just delivering a beating to a chick. It should have been a clue to him when the beat-ee, up to this incident his domestic partner, produced a handgun and fired at him, missing.

This is what interpersonal-kinetics instructors call a second chance.

To desist. To bug out. But he didn’t flee. He charged. She shot.

Game over, man.

Sheriff Leroy Ravenell says officers were called to a North home just after 1:30 a.m. to investigate the shooting death of a 24-year-old.

When deputies arrived to the Woodford Road home, they were met by a 23-year-old woman who says she was being beaten and dragged when the fatal shot was fired.

“Our investigation indicates the man became angry when he located paperwork in the woman’s purse from another jurisdiction where the man was listed as a suspect,” said Ravenell. “When the couple started arguing, the woman wanted to make a call to hav

It depends.

It depends on whether they want to serve you, because you’re important or powerful or — especially — connected. Or whether you’re someone that they’re free to mess with, because you’re not any of those things.

For NFA weapons imported, exported or transferred between LE departments, wait time is a month or two. Believe it or not, that’s fast by ATF standards and they’re happy with this underperformance.

For privately held NFA weapons, the wait for ATF approval stretches out nine months. That’s true whether you’re buying it or building it yourself (for those NFA weapons that can be self-built legally, like SBRs and AOWs).

These are average times, which means that for up to half of the people, trusts and corporations waiting for a Form 1 or Form 4, it takes longer.

Why the disparity? Why can ATF bestir themselves to approve the Form 5 for the Skunk Hollow County Sheriff’s Department’s bel

Canejo senior in his Level 3 Sex Offender mugshot.

Quite literally in this case: Let us count the ways.

1. The father-son tag team charged with the crowbar murder and dismemberment of a Somerville, Massachusetts man and the disposal of his body are arguably outside the law in so doing. Even in Massachusetts.
2. They also are are, at least in the father’s case, felons, only on the loose because Massachusetts judges try to avoid punishing criminals. (He is a Level 3 sex offender from at least two rapes. In fact, the mugshot is his perv registry shot).
3. The apple did not fall far from the criminal tree: Junior was, in fact, on parole or probation;
4. Massachusetts has strict licensing, registration, assault weapons bans, magazine bans, and other extreme antigun measures. Indeed, until a change of police chiefs in one town a couple of years ago and in the other this year, both the city where

From one uniform to another, that’s Hoffman’s story.

Robert Patrick Hoffman II was a career Navy CTT, an enlisted rating involved in the collection and processing of electronic intelligence. He was a submariner (CTs are often assigned to subs). Both the intelligence and submarine fields let a sailor develop a lot of knowledge, knowledge that hostile intelligence services want, and that a sailor — active or retired — is sworn to protect.

But when he retired, Hoffman decided to try to sell his knowledge to a foreign intelligence service. His motivation seems to have been money, and ego: he was too clever by far to be caught by what he saw as the dull and plodding FBI. He also fancied himself a ladies’ man, like James Bond, without the patriotism and loyalty. Except, he was going to betray the Russians too, for the sheer hell of it, to show he was smarter than them, too, well

Have a look at this set of photographs of Bundeswehr snipers shot by German photog Simon Menner. If you click on through to the Daily Mail, there’s a slide show with over a dozen of these brain teasers. This one is the only one where they have the sniper stand up. The others, they just circle the hide in red. You’ll do well to spot a third of them — even with the red circles.

A successful sniper has to be good at two things: shooting a rifle and blending in with their surroundings, as to not be seen by the intended target.

As German artist Simon Menner recently found out, military snipers are incredibly skilled at the latter – often blending into their surroundings so well that they can’t be seen even if you know where to look.

Menner recently was granted permission to photograph German Army snipers as they blended into several landscapes. What he captured on film was the incredible way in which these snipers can make themselves nearly invisible to the naked eye &#8

Tactical shelves. Lord love a duck.

Still, the idea of having secret compartments appeals to the little kid in all of us. It’s also a great way to ingratiate yourself with kids, grandkids, or nephews — if you’re 100% sure they can be trusted — even then, don’t show them everything. They can’t give up what they don’t know, even under torture.

The guys selling this stuff do make one error, which we’ll discuss in a minute.

The shelves are reasonably priced for semi-custom concealment pieces. They’re available from Tactical (what else?) Walls, and we saw them in the following writeup at guns.com earlier this month:

Obscurity is best security.

The big one runs $380 and the little one runs $280. They of course can be modded with acc

Here is one of the greatest asshats of all time, and of course, he’s whining, complaining, and feeling put-upon. Why? Because prison sucks, his game console is outdated, and they don’t let him play violent video games. Also, those cruel wardens of Norwegian lockups didn’t even give him a couch or armchair – yes, he demands an armchair – so he has to play his non-violent games (quel horreur!) sitting in a hard wooden chair.

O, the humanity.

How’s that “raising childrens’ self-esteem” working out for you, world?

Take it awaaaay, Agence France-Presse:

Norwegian mass murderer Anus Bozo* threatened to go on hunger strike for better video games and other perks to alleviate his “torture”-like prison conditions, in a letter received by AFP Friday.

Saturday, we told the story of A Unit Like No Other (or, a little bit of the story). The unit was the 39th Special Forces Company (classsified name) aka Detachment A, Berlin Brigade (cover name) and it existed all but behind enemy lines from 1956 to 1984.

Much of what it did can’t be told, but at least its existence can now be celebrated and memorialized. So there is that.

Saturday, the prepared post didn’t “execute” due to editor error, so we just put it up (backdated) today. Busy busy busy.

Naturally, the downstate Times is asleep on the switch on this one, but the papers in upstate have been working the phones, and New York groups and associations have also been commenting.

Let’s lead with Fran Madore, of the United Mine Workers Local 717:

“It can’t be good,” said Fran Madore, president of United Mine Workers Local 717, which represents 1,180 of the 1,300 Remington employees in Ilion. “How can it be good?”

Military Times reported that the company’s expansion in Alabama would not affect Remington’s operations in Ilion. But Madore said he’s afraid the company has soured on New York because of the passage of the SAFE Act, which bans assault weapons such as the AR-15 made by Remington.

Madore said he’s worried the company will move jobs out of Ilion, the Herkimer County village where the company has been making firearms since 1816.

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One of the things social scientists (moron, oxy, one each) prattle on about is “assortative mating”: you’re most likely to marry and have kids (or for those of you on the post-68 edge of society or dependent on welfare, just “have kids”) with someone close to you in social and economic class, which those same oxymorons capture as “socioeconomic status.”

Yes, it’s pseudoscience, but bear with us for a minute.

This is Huntsville, Alabama, in case you never saw it before. Anniston (“Annistan”) it’s not. You would probably like living and working in this city or its suburbs.

They impute

Don’t expect much from us today, except to post last weeks TW3. We didn’t get to it last night.

Today is a recovery day, let us give thanks.

Davis died in the back seat of this well-ventilated SUV.

The troublesome shooting case of Michael Dunn has reached a milestone, if not an end, with Dunn’s conviction this evening on most of the charges, including three counts of attempted murder in the second degree, and one of “throwing a missile into an occupied vehicle,” a quaint Floridian construction.

These charges are all serious felonies and Andrew Branca’s opinion is that they will yield a sentence of 25 years to life. In practical terms, this is a life sentence for the sixtysomething Dunn. In prison terms, it may be a short life sentence: whether he had a great racial animus that drove his shooting isn’t clear to us — Byron de la Beckwith he is not — but many if not most black Americans think he did, and he is likely to find black prisoners extremely hostile. If he’s not a racist now,

It’s the 1980s, and you’re in a setting that’s just as mundane and boring in real life as it is in the film: a post office. A clerk is working the window; not particularly sociable even by the low standards of the postal service, he keeps his head down. 

A man asks to buy a single stamp in a European accent. The clerk looks up. There’s a flash of recognition, and before you can say Jack Robinson the clerk has produced a pistol — a Luger, oddly enough — and fired two rounds into the presumed postal patron, who falls dead as a mackerel.

The camera pulls back. What the hell just happened?

Welcome to the start of Miracle at St. Anna, which could have been one of the great classic war films if it maintained that level of impact throughout. We’ll tell you right now, it didn’t. There are too many characters, and too many complicated interactions; the movie has ambitions beyond the possible, and the dynam

Tsopas’s car. Call it the recovered projectile.

Matt Tsopas was not having an especially law-abiding day. According a stack of 14 indictments, he started off by getting drunk at the Legion bar and turning his belligerence on an employee and other patrons, assaulting three with his fists, and throwing a drink at the next. (It’s not clear, but this may have eventuated when the bartender shut him off. Not soon enough, it turns out).

Tsopas mugshot.

Then, he left the bar, but had some trouble leaving the parking lot. If you ever wonder whether you

From 1956 to 1984, a secret unit of select Special Forces men existed behind de facto Russian lines in the enclave of West Berlin. The existence of the unit, called the 39th Special Forces Company, or Berlin Brigade Detachment A, is now declassified, and the men who made it up have been honored at the US Army Special Operations Memorial Plaza. The quote in the title came from USASOC CG Charles Cleveland, who said also that they “played a crucial role in vanquishing an existential threat to our country and our way of life.”

Det A memorial stone is unveiled by CW4 Jimmy Spoo and MG Sid Schacknow, (both ret’d). Bob Charest seated left. Charlie Cleveland, seated r.

Cleveland sees Det A, as SF men have long known the unit, as not only a success on its own level, but as a model for today’s Special Forces soldiers.

For Banks (l.) every day is Halloween.

Were we chumps to go to SFQC, or what? Because this assclown not only awarded himself SFQC qualification, he promoted himself to major while he was at it.

And Gregory C. Banks managed all this without the keepers of the records ever having any indication he was in the army. Ever. Either he’s so superstealthy that the air itself doesn’t dare to flow back in to the places he’s just left, or he’s full of shit.

You know what the right answer is. If he were any more full of effluent, the septic system truck would be backing up to him right now. WFSB-TV interviews a man who fingered him as a phony:

“He said he was a special forces major and was stopping through. He was back from deployment for a couple weeks, problem solving ove

The two guns, still held by the Sheriff’s Department that captured them, are usually locked away in this cabinet. Image source.

The Mob Museum, which is appropriately enough in the Mob’s own creation, Las Vegas, is displaying two submachine guns that were part of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre today.

The Massacre answered the 1929 iteration of that perennial underground question, “Who will be the boss?” Seven Bugsy Moran goons were blown away by Thompson-wielding members of Al Capone’s gang. The fate of most of the guns used by the Capon goons is unknown, with two exceptions.

…from John Richardson at No Lawyers, who looks back at the biathlon of 50 years ago, and sees a number of interesting firearms. In those days, he explains, biathlon was truer to its military roots: they had to shoot at ranges from 100 to 250m, five shots at each 50m increment. That pretty much compelled the use of a centerfire cartridge.

Then as now, biathlon was dominated by the Nordic nations, If you stretch the idea of Nordic to include snowbound Russia. Sweden made a number of interesting adaptations of its 6.5 x 55mm service rifles. The Soviet Union and Finland adapted the Mosin-Nagant, Finland in its native 7.62 x 54, and the USSR in a special 6.5 x 54mm caliber. The rifle shown above is a Finnish biathlon rifle of this period, built on an octagonal Mosin-Nagant receiver. You can see the Mo-Nag’s distinctive magazine just peeking out from the deep target stock.

Only in 1978 did the IOC change the rules to specify a rimfire