Weapons Man

We in the combat-American minority community tend to think of the MP5 as something passé: H&K blew the chance to sell millions of the things to the US military when they resolutely refused to re-engineer it for .45. Instead — during the Because you suck, and we hate you period explained here — making a 10mm version for black-clad Federal ninjutsu teams exclusively. That was one of the more boneheaded moves in the history of firearms marketing: FBI and ATF have about 5000 Special Agents each; the Army could have bought many times that number of .45 versions. The FBI, at least, still uses the 10mm MP5 lightly. The ATF’s best day with the gun was fatally backshooting one of their own agents with it through a wall at Waco.

H&K’s historically common MP5 variant in SOF world, the MP5A3.

Meanwhile, SOF discovered

And so the WeaponsMan will be weaponizing the kitchen, with intent to produce chicken parmagiana and pasta for the crowd… special set-aside for the niece who is turned off by red sauce. We are not exactly that Emerald La Gast dude here. In fact, diners will probably insist on counting the chef’s fingers before digging in to the meat sauce.

O ye of little faith!

After dinner there may be some snowshoeing and skiing in the back 40. (Forty what, we’re not sayin’.) Or we may just sit and catch up. It will be good, “irregardless,” as generations of stolid but non-too-bright NCOs like to put it.

This past week we got a bit nuked by schedule. On the plus side, it is truly good to have work in meatworld picking up. On the minus side, we can work for dollars or continue to entertain ourselves and our dozens of followers worldwide with the blog. We’ve tried to bank a few posts for future tight spots, but they quickly run out. If we have to, we’ll take a hit to the current four-posts-per-workday schedule and roll it back a bit.

But only if we have to.

Hope you are all enjoying your families this fine Sunday.

This is going to be a shorter TW3 than usual. We’re pressed for time.

The key feature of the post, the links to this week’s stories, should be solid, though.

The links will probably be live when the post goes live. If not, they will all be enlivened by Sunday midnight, or we’ll sacrifice a kid goat; to find the posts scroll down. Enjoy!

Our article count was 26, up a hair from last week’s 29, Word count was much higher, 22,000 versus 16,000 words. Five posts were over 1,000 words, three of them over 2,000.

The mean and median post sizes were 839 and 749 respectively, miuch higher than last week’s numbers, reflective of a lack of very short posts and an overall tendency to longer ones. There was only one sub-100-word post, and 8 total sub-500-word posts (down from 12). We exceeded our desired objective of 19 posts by 7. So far this year we&#82

Under Heavy Fire has been released in two formats and with two titles; this review is of the shorter one. And our heart goes out to anyone who actually had to watch the long one and review it. (It was under the title Going Back.). As Under Fire it’s a staple of the 20-movies-for$10 anthology DVDs, thrown together with other B-movies and TV movies and old black-and-white two-reelers. It is a Vietnam movie, and a contender for the hotly contested title, Worst Vietnam Movie, Period.

This is despite, or perhaps because, it was directed by Sidney Furie, who made the cult Vietnam war film The Boys in Company C. Th

Given that certain politicians assure us that guns are responsible for all homicides, it’s always eye-opening to see one where the gun apparently done the deed and then got clean away.

She says she was driving through the hood and never saw the dood on her hood, but.…

[Sherry Lynn Wilkins,] who drove 2 miles through a Los Angeles suburb with a dying man on her windshield has been convicted of second-degree murder, drunken driving and hit-and-run charges.

Prosecutors say Wilkins’ blood-alcohol level was nearly twice the legal limit for driving when she struck 31-year-old Phillip Moreno in November 2012 in suburban Torrance.

The 52-year-old defendant testified she drank three tiny bottles of vodka and a can of beer that night and was not drunk.

via Woman who dr

Thought experiment: what if you spoke up, forcefully, for religious freedom in an Islamist dictatorship that is a nominal theocracy? Would you have the moral and physical courage to try? We might not. Even an individual whose Moslem faith is strong and who is unassailable on that point would probably have a hard time, wouldn’t he?

Well, it’s not a thought experiment. It’s a real case underway in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the speaker is this guy, Ayatollah Boroujerdi, according to the Gatestone Institute. Since being incarcerated, he’s taken off his religious robes as an act of protest. As you might expect, being locked up in Iran is a little different from being in Club Fed with Jack Madoff and all the governors of Illinois and speakers of the Massachusetts state house.

Ayatollah Hossein-Kazamani Boroujerdi, a senior member of the Shiite Muslim clergy, is presently serving the eighth year of an 11-year sentence handed down to him by the Islamic Republic’s courts for advocating the separation of state and religion inside Iran. He has also spoken against political Isla

Larry Vickers runs through the history of the Browning Automatic Rifle. Three minutes.

In our time in the Army, we were brought up by Vietnam era or earlier vets who swore by this thing. Because they still existed in strategic caches and other storage, they were still part of the SF weapons man’s qualification until the end of the strategic cache program in the 1990s.

As Vickers relates, the BAR underwent no major changes throughout its official wife, which lasted from 1918 to 1958. The bipod and carrying handle were added, and an option for semi automatic fire was deleted, because at the slow rate of fire, it was easy to fire single shots by trigger manipulation. Those changes were complete by the mid-1920s, and the BA are was the base of fire of the infantry squad throughout World War II and the Korean War.

Even after the nominal replacement of the BAR by the M60 GPMG, National Guard, ARVN (both until circa 1970), and other foreign armies continued to use the ancient weapon. The Army’s replacement for the BAR in the squad automatic rifle role was for many years simply a standard infantry rifle, M14 or M16, fired in the automatic mode. T

Then, there are some double standards that don’t seem so controversial.

If there’s one thing most people who aren’t police don’t like, it’s double standards for cops. Cops, on the other hand, either argue that there is no double standard (which seems to be one of those “who are you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes,” things), or, more credibly, that any apparent variation is justified. It might be justified because of different circumstances, or because of unreasonable expectations that people have of police officers. In deepest Dannelstan, a jurisdiction that once called itself “The Constitution State” without intentional irony, the same department has recently jailed a citizen for a negligent discharge in his home, and excused and minimized a negligent discharge by one of their own officers in a packed public place.

Carrying signs that re

Some doctors heal the sick. Some doctors study the enemy, the pathogen, and show us new ways to find, fix and finish him. And some doctors have fantasies of standing on a train platform, sending people left or right at their whim. Meet John Leventhal of Yale Medical School, the would-be Dr Castro, Dr Zawahiri, and Dr Mengele of the Final Solution to the Gun Owner problem. Leventhal is an anti-gun activist who uses doctored statistics and appeals to emotion, clothed in academic language. 

In a new report published in the February issue of its journal, Pediatrics, it reported that 7,391 children were hospitalized for gunshot wounds in the U.S. in 2009 — about 20 a day. Of those, 1,000 were under the age of 15.

The study found more than half of the injuries — 4, 559 — were the result of assaults. Another 270 were suicide attempts. Of all the children hospitalized, 453 died from their injuries.

Children who died before reaching the hospi

There might be a worse paper than the LA Times. (Boston Globe, maybe?). But the Times works so hard at hammering the stock tropes its well-to-do liberal Anglo readership expects, that sometimes it descends, headlong, into unwitting parody. You find yourself asking: is this the Times, or the Onion? And how can you tell? 

It’s worse than that online quiz that asks you to distinguish excerpts from Earth in the Balance from ones from The Unabomber Manifesto. But we’ve discovered the secret: unlike Earth in the Balance, The Unabomber Manifesto, and the average thumbsucker in the LA Times, the Onion’s pieces are usually brief and succinct.

Every story in the Times serves The Narrative, and the facts are made to fit, beaten to shape with the body man’s hammer and dolly if need be. One great example

An incredible obituary, by a man who “met” him under a steel prison door in the Hanoi Hilton.

Risner was not only a three-war veteran and an ace (in Korea), but one of the greatest leaders of the 4th Allied POW Wing.

James Robinson Risner was a man of humble origins, son of an Arkansas sharecropper, educated at secondary school level, not particularly ambitious, a common man save for two things: He could fly the hell out of an airplane; and, under terribly difficult circumstances as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, he rose to a level of heroic leadership matched by few men in American military history.

Raised in a religious family, Risner made his first critical life choice between attending Bible College or joining the Army Air Forces during World War II. When he passed the tough entrance exam for pilot training by one point, he took it as a vector from God, and his future aloft was set.

Flying came easily to the gifted trainee, which led to a coveted as

Workers and police examine bullet damage that disabled a California power station in April, 2013.

Long, long ago US Special Operations Forces extensively studied what you can do with a sniper rifle, beyond just killing people. And they discovered that some items are highly vulnerable to what’s called in the trade a “standoff attack”.

Someone, in the United States, has gone beyond studying targets and has attacked at least one of them in this way; the FBI and other agencies are investigating, and playing their investigation very close to the chest. Hold that thought while we can consider what a mere rifle can do, and in a while we’ll tell you what a rifle or rifles did last April.

Many mighty weapons systems and economic targets are vulnerable to the sort of projectile that might be launched by an

Made by a bunch of Israelis with a sense of humor (and, unfortunately, an actor with a Hebrew accent instead of Kerry’s carefully maintained Haaahvaahd one). .

The video was roundly condemned by National Security Advisor (and National YouTube Video Critic — who can forget her performance lying on the talk shows about Benghazi?) Susan Rice. Despite a smattering of surprises, here and there in her long and dismal career, Rice can usually be expected to do what an anti-Semite would do (and she doesn’t fail that expectation this time, either).

Apparently it’s evil to criticize Kerry and his (and Rice’s, Powers’s et al.) Islamist tilt these days. (How Islamist? Rice doesn’t just favor Hamas over Israel, she has favored Hamas over Fatah). Even if we felt no affinity whatsoever for the Jews of Israel, even if we did not see echoes of our values there (and there alone) in the region, even if we were strict pragmatists committed to a rigidly utillitarian view of the world. Even if all those counterfactuals were true, how can Rice’s and Kerry’s favored end-game, the completion of the long-running

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw5jEp3ZwR0

It’s not just really bad. It’s about the war on wanking. 

We got a particular kick out of the way they armed the actors with SKSes and at least one tube-fed .22. But nothing really beats the way they use the SKS sights:

Erm, yeah.

Well, it is a movie about wankers. So there is that.

And at least it has a happy ending. If you can’t make it all the way through this short without blinding yourself with tears of laughter, we’ll put up the spoiler for you: after his buddy talks him out of amusing himself by abusing himself, his lonely life ends. Future Plaintiffs pop up like mushrooms, as if the spores were always there.

Hmmm. Maybe that’s what we did wrong. Does it work in reverse?

Prototype No 3, the last known Webley Jurek pistol.

Pity poor Dr Marian K. Jurek (YOOR-eck). He had a great gun design, and first-class machining skills. He was just always in the wrong country. Most of what we know about his beautiful Experimental Webley 9mm pistol we know thanks to British gun historian A.J.R. Cormack, who carried on a correspondence with him while both still lived. Ezell’s magisterial Handguns of the World does not contain anything on Jurek or his designs, not because Ezell didn’t know of them (he almost certainly did) but because they were postwar, and outside the 1900-45 scope of Handguns. Reportedly, there is a chapter in Cuthbertson’s book on Webley pistols that covers this gun, but the Unconventional Warfare Reference Library does not contain that volume (note to editors… order book, update post).

And most of what we know about Jurek&#821

You get the sense that the original intent of C&Rsenal was to provide information about the sort of obsolete military (mostly) arms that are available to Americans who hold a “Curio & Relics” collectors’ license. But over the years it has evolved in different directions and with different results, results that make it quite interesting.

One thing the site has is excellent photography. The M14 POV picture to the right is actually a reject or unfinished image, by C&Rsenal’s standards.  It’s an interesting picture that shows you the standard (as opposed to NM) sights, and a rare M14 that has the selector switch on the right-hand side.

Fun fact about the M14 in automatic mode: it’s useless, you can’t hit jack with it, and the designers knew this from the very beginning. They knew that the quadruple objectives of reducing the weight of the M1, converting to a new cartridge of equivalent power (and recoil), increas

“You really can’t put a value on a show like this.”

That’s what vendor Jim Kowalski told a reporter at the Harrisburg, PA outdoor show, a show that was scrubbed last year when the then-sponsors, a British exhibition group, attempted to do a General Gage on the colonists’ guns and force the show to be modern rifle-free.

They got about the same treatment Gage did, and after months of being roughly handled by the obstreperous colonials (including this blog, not that we delude ourselves into thinking we were a factor), and having their vendors flee like a covey of spooked quail, they tottered off back to the land of bad teeth and servility, and the NRA took over the show.

The initial verdict on the NRA as manager (and the Outdoor Channel as sponsor) is in even as the nine day show (Feb. 1-9) is still underway: “Fantastic.”  A few more lines from the news report:

the aisles were jam-packed with people on opening da

The no-good bums at TSA are good for one thing: endless stories about a dysfunctional agency full of marginal human beings. No-one good, decent, honest, moral or competent has ever been employed by TSA in any capacity whatsoever. Instead you get people like these. Read on:

Houston police arrested a Transportation Security Administration officer accused of making a threat to fellow employees at Bush Intercontinental Airport.The incident reportedly happened on Jan. 25 in the security checkpoint area of Terminal C.

Jeno Mouton, of Houston, allegedly told a TSA supervisor that “he would rather vent than to come back and shoot up the place,” according to an arrest affidavit.

Investigators said Mouton, who is a long-time employee, allegedly made the comment while he was on-duty and working in the capacity of a TSA officer.

Now, to us, this sounds like, “Young man loses his temper, says something reta

You can’t possibly have missed the claims made by the guys behind RIP (Radically Invasive Projectile) ammunition. Because the claims were so over-the-top, we dismissed the round as snake oil.  But we weren’t going to debunk the claims. Fortunately, someone else did. We don’t know the guy’s name, but the fellow at Shooting the Bull shows what these magic rounds are good at (and what they’re not).

BLUF: Yes, it can cause serious wounds. But it’s not as effective as a traditional, top-line JHP.

Part I:

Part II:

Some of the company’s claims were clearly nonsense. But the round did have some interesting properties. It was more effective than the traditional JHP after penetrating plywood (the JHPs did not expand).

Look, there’s no magic ammunition: nothing you can chamber in a barrel is going to do to a bad guy what you’d like to do to him (unless your barrel is 155mm and tows behind an LMTV, which limits your co

Jasper, RIP. Image: James Lileks

Death has a way of inspiring art. George Harrison, who preceded us all into that unknowable country, sang of it from time to time, as a focus of his spiritual journey. “There comes a time when all of us must leave here / When nothing Sister Mary can do / Will keep me here with you.”  He’s “there” now; and while his conception of “there” during his life may have differed from yours or mine, no one on this side knows to a scientific certainty what that side is.

If you are young, you may not have thought much of death; you are immortal, and such thoughts are morbid, and God has so blessed you that the loves of your life are still living and breathing. For many, the first loss is a family pet; the cat slain by that great predator of cats, the Goodyear Eagle; the dog overcome by old age and infirmity.

Writer James Lileks is no stranger t