Weapons Man

The three are three regimes of operations. Not all elements of an armed force can operate in all three. (Relatively few can, actually). Elements of national-level intelligence services cannot generally operate in all three regimes (some nations like Russia and Iran are exceptions, with intel agencies that also field armed forces of their own).

The three are often defined erroneously. We link here to the official DOD definitions, which differ in important details from some seen on the net.

The DOD Pub 1 definition is: “An operation conducted openly, without concealment.”

This is the modus operandi of field armies. When the 2nd Guards Tank Army punches through your cavalry cordon, the 2nd Ranger Battalion seizes your airfield, the 2nd Legion routs your Teutonic horde, there’s no doubt about what happened, who did it, or why. A known enemy has conducted a combat operation, and you can basically answer the 5Ws of that operation. In

Welcome to the lastest installment in The Continuing Adventures of Bubba the Gunsmith ™. Please keep your hands, feet, and metal-cutting tools inside the ride at all times.

OK. We understand that there was a time when a 1911 was just a gun, they were two-for-a-case-of-beer-and-you-can-owe-me-the-beer, and all that. Still, every once in a while you see a weapon so violated and mutilated that its metal soul cries out for release. Like the puppies in ASPCA videos, it begs you to give it a forever home — even in a Bessemer Converter. Just to put it out of John M. Browning’s misery.

There’s an auction up on GB with a gun like that. It was someone’s brain-dead idea of a target gun. He started with a rare Colt M1911 (not A1), a gun produced only from 1911 to 1918, and then in small numbers until 1926. Then he added an el-cheapo, crudely machined aftermarket “Triangle” brand rear sight, a large front sight, and a tighter-fitting aftermarket barrel bushing. So

“I don’t like the way this story ends” — this kitten is an Israeli photographer’s pet, not one of the figures in this story, thank God.

If you are what you eat, this guy’s a pussy. He’s also in jail in Italy. It seems he loved cats, but not in what the subscribers to Cat Fancy think of as the normal way.

Staff at the shelters only became suspicious when he tried to avoid routine check-ups on the adopted animals.

After becoming concerned that he might be part of a sect targeting black cats for animal sacrifices, staff arrived at his home unannounced.

The horrified rescue workers from AIDAA, Italy’s equivalent of the RSPCA, allegedly found him preparing to kill a cat he intended to eat.

Lorenzo Croce of AIDAA said the man al

Another Secret Policeman has left a gun lying around for anyone to pick up, but Homeland Security has closed ranks around the reckless agent, who will not be identified to the mere public or press, let alone face any consequences.

The incident happened in Redondo Beach, CA. A resident thought he found a guitar and happily took the case home to check it out. Opening it, he was dissapointed to find, instead, the gun — and something was ticking. He called police, who responded and called the LASD bomb squad. There was no bomb, just a greeting card; but the gun was loaded and ready to rock.

Semper Fee, guys:

Her parents were affirmative-action-hire professors and she has a PhD her ownself, so of course this product of the Self-Esteem Generation is as dumb as a box of rocks, without the common sense God gave the birds of the air and the beasts of the field.

So in a segment where she’s concern-trolling the military, she gets all choked up about the power of military mottoes. Like “Semper Fee.”

This is the same girl that showed her complete lack of class and breeding, not to mention her unseemly racism, in an attack on Mitt Romney’s grandchild (a) because the kid was black and (b) because she disagrees with Romney’s politics. What can you really say about a person like this, who was not raised with a shred of humanity or decency?

She comes from the academic class, and no doubt thinks that Marines (and all the rest of us “green-collar” workers) are dumb. Well, how does it feel to be dumber than every. Single. Marine. Boot. Ever. Huh? And every one of their friends and family members?

Then, there’s the diversion of American supplies into the black market. Wonder what percentage these three payroll patriots are raking off?

…is that the people in charge of the effort simply don’t give a damn. Dana Rorabacher, a Republican from California and a defense hawk, delights in pointing this out; and still, time after time, administration officials go before his committee in ignorance of basic facts. Like what the budget for the Afghan war is. Or how many troops we have lost.

Even though they know he’s going to do this, they still come unprepared. The reason is simple: they don’t give a crap. Unlike the guys on the ground, the Beltway boyars face no risks whatsoever. Over time they build up a contempt for the troops in the field, as these three bozos, Dobbins, Dumont, and Sampler, illustrated back in December.

President Barack

MP40 Instructional table or poster.

The Iconic 2nd-generation SMG was also the first of the second generation: the German MP38 and its more common descendant, the MP40. These were not only the arms of the Blitzkrieg, and also of generations of war movies and TV shows, but they were also the arms of resistance and revolutionary warfare, at least until the Russians could get the AKs distributed as widely as they’d like to have done.

And that made them, also, the arms of spy dramas and TV and movie bad guys for a very long time. How long? One of the bad guys in the relatively recent Gangster Squad turned up toting an MP40.

And the gun, itself, was historic and interesting. So a site dedicated to the MP40 will be, if halfway decently done, good stuff. But fortunately, the MP40.nl site is more than halfway decently done. It’s excellent with large quantit

We’ve seen this time and time again: some criminal or nut job commits an atrocity. And politicians leap to crack down on the multitudes who didn’t do it, but are not of the pols’ party. That’s what Connecticut’s exponent of Peace-Love-Dope, Governor Dannel (his parents were too stoned to spell “Daniel”) Malloy did after the Newtown school shooting, rushing to enact an ill-considered raft of laws designed to turn the state’s gun owners into felons, and incidentally, to provide a handy list, through registration, for future ratisserages.

Malloy considers this “compromise, common-sense” legislation. We guess that means he forebore on his original plan of having them wear a yellow triangle, and building camps. But he ran into one problem.

The dogs aren’t eating the dog food. To return to the last metaphor, the Nutmeg State’s gun owners aren’t lining up for their yellow triangles. Malloy’s “common sense” registry of “assault weap

She doesn’t look crazy, until you notice the dead eyes — Samantha Heath, 18.

In what’s reported to be a case of a stressful domestic, possibly triangular, relationship that previously led to one woman arming herself with that weapon so beloved of the legal establishment, the mighty paper “protective order,” the woman so armed, if she emerges from her coma, will have learned a valuable lesson: “Never bring a protective order to a knife fight.” Indeed, the balance of knife wounds was 15 or 16 (the media are not in agreement) to 0.

An 18-year-old Allenstown woman is recovering from 15 stab wounds she received on Sunday night, shortly before being pushed out of a car on a deserted road that goes through Bear Brook State Park, authorities said Monday.

Her alleged assailant — Samantha Heath, 18 — was arraigned in Hooksett District Court Monday on a first-degree assault charge. Her

If you’re doing something that makes the thought cross your mind, “I’m screwed if the Government is monitoring my computer use,” bend over and kiss your precious glutei good-bye. You’re already screwed, because they are monitoring your computer use.

NSA, after all, gives two to five tips a day to the FBI on Americans unconnected to foreign espionage or terrorism, and a few more to the other TLA’s. (Three Letter Agencies). In the last decade, these agencies’ policies have tended towards reshaping these agencies (including NSA) into partisan political police, but they’re not above nibbling when someone committing actual crimes (in this case, international gun smuggling) sets himself up as low-hanging fruit.

Matthew Crisafi, 38, of Esker Road, [Hampton, NH] was extradited to New Jersey last month after he was arrested on a warrant on three firearm trafficking charges by special agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Homeland Security Investigations. He was released on $50,000

Seen on an original Artillerie Inrichtingen AR-10 in the Springfield Armory collection. It’s a bit of a challenge to scope these, and any retro-prototype AR-15, with the charging handle “trigger” inside the carrying handle; the thing tends to get caught up in the mount’s thumbscrew.

It looks like someone figured out how to do it before this gun wound up in Springfield’s collection.

This particular AR-10 has had the carrying handle sight guards milled down to provide a flat surface for a scope mount, with a very thin scope mount screw. With the mount, but no scope, in place, the iron sights are still usable. The Springfield Armory record for this exhibit suggests that it was made for a night scope:

NETHERLANDS RIFLE AR10 7.62MM SN# 003769
Manufactured by Artillerie-Inrichtingen, Hembrug-Zaandam, Netherlands – Early production type gas-operated select-fire rifle manufactured under license in Holland. Select-fire. 4-

When something bad happens, people cry out, “Someone has to pay for this!” A problem arises when the author of the misconduct is not present to answer charges. Lawyers, being lawyers, then seek to visit all the cruelties of the law upon whomever they can rationalize into responsibility.

In this particular case, a teenager got access to his girlfriend’s father’s service pistol (the man was the Chief of Police in their small town). He didn’t go on a murder spree, though — fearing the girl was dumping him, he shot himself, and thereby embroiled her father in trouble.

The lawyer for Danville Police Chief Wade Parsons is asking a judge to dismiss a charge accusing the chief of failing to secure a handgun used by a teenager in a suicide last year.

Alan Cronheim has filed a motion in the Salem Circuit Court seeking to toss the negligent storage of a firearm charge filed in the wake of 15-year-old Jacob Carver’s death inside the chief’s Danville home on March 11, 2013.

According

Sunday’s road trip was to Springfield Armory. Not the Illinois outfit that has made it a trade name, but the actual site of the nation’s top armory (small arms design and manufacturing) and arsenal (small arms storage) from 1795 to 1968.

Learned on this trip:

• 1: The museum is the world’s most intensive Victim Disarmament Zone, with no less than five no-guns signs stuck to the main entrance, two in English, two in Spanish (a necessity in Springfield these days), and one just a symbol. The next picture is an enlarged excerpt of the shot at left, where you can barely see two of the no-guns icons (the third is to the right of the lower one, but too faded to make out; the fourth and fifth were on the left side of the door. Sorry for the crummy picture, but we were cell-phone-snapping blind, in bright sunlight). There is just something wronger than a football bat about a gun-free gun museum.

The British-based bank is struggling to pay its depositors, and erecting various undocumented obstacles in their way to prevent them withdrawing their money (Report at BBC). (Another report at ZeroHedge).

Not many Americans bank with HSBC — like most large banks, it has nothing to offer small depositors but fees, inconvenience and risk — but those that do, might be well advised to get their cash out.

HSBC probably only has cash to cover a few percent of its deposits. The liquidity squeeze began when an Asian analyst noted that the bank has somewhere between 60 and 90 billion dollars in underperforming assets on its balance sheet.

The bank has earned a bad reputation

Some things is percolatin’. And some things is not. And work, that dread four-letter word, requires us to update our Action This Day template (a term lifted from Winston Churchill’s notepad) and actually, you know, take action this day.

One great thing about an SF background and a life of many careers is that you never lack for variety. Today, we shall be working on: some technical stuff for an injection-molding firm, advice for a young entrepreneur, overdue taxes, setting up a visit to New York, shaking the trees for some background on a retired officer, a phone call to a hospitalized relative, some typing on a work of short fiction, and this blog, as time permits. Then there’s a few things that need doing around the house, and we have to inspect a store of rifle barrels to see if the storage is too damp, and if so, to brainstorm a solution. That’s if a call doesn’t come in about a project in Iraq or one in Qatar. Life is good, if not predictable.

We also have a to-do list that stretches from here into the distant future. And we have a pile of new books to read and, perhaps, review. Life is indeed good.

One of the effects training for something like SF, SAS or SEALs has on a guy is this: self-confidence. Sometimes, too much self-confidence. And always, self-confidence about both those areas where he had demonstrated elite-level competence (long-distance night land-navigation, or enduring sleep and food deprivation) and those areas where he would be better off to admit he is a novice.

Family tells me that living with a guy who is convinced he can master almost anything is a never-ending source of entertainment.

Unlike most men, vets are often pretty good at following instructions. That is because the Army (etc.) is pretty good about attaching instructions to everything, often as a brain-dead cartoon. For example, the M72 Light Antitank Weapon (renamed Light Anti Armor Weapon after the fall of Lang Vei proved that all a LAW did to tanks was anger the crew and make them want to fight you), has instructions in a cartoon format right on it:

(Image ganked from somwhere on the net. If it’s yours, let us know and we’ll credit you).

Week 4 was a strange week. We dumped out an awful lot of words, and yet comments fell back to 2013 levels, although part of that is that some posts have long comment tails, and we’re writing this TW3 on time for a change.

These things aren’t a lot of fun to do, but they’re necessary for several reasons. One of the big reasons is that it provides us a reality check on what we’re doing. By examining and comparing popular posts to less-popular ones, we hope to provide a better blog in the long run.

We’ve also heard from readers who use these end-of-the-week posts as a way to catch up on what they may have missed during a busy week. And we’ve heard from a couple of masochists, who even went back to the very beginning (January 1, 2012), after discovering this blog, in order not to miss any posts. And we didn’t even pay them!

The links will probably be live when the post goes live. If not, they will all be enlivened by Sunday midnight; to find the posts scroll down. Enjoy!

In 2012, Sylvester Stallone decided to use publicity events for the movie he was promoting to make himself relevant to the anti-gun media by denouncing guns and the people that own them, to try to leverage the publicity over crimes into publicity for his upcoming movie — this turkey.

The transparent move worked about as well as you might expect, considering that Stallone’s character in the movie is a slow to think, quick to act, violent serial killer named James Bonomo aka Jimmy Bobo. Apparently the actor, who is rumored to be very much brighter than the knuckle-dragging morons he usually plays, is, despite that, not so great at self-assessment.

First, the UTS-15 shotgun, designed in the USA and made in Turkey, is on the cover of everything this month. And, it didn’t make the cover, but it did get a write-up in American Rifleman, of which more below. It’s a pretty cool gun — we like that you can screw a duckbill choke in, as it takes standard Beretta-style chokes. Left, just a couple examples of the UTS-15 (somewhat confusingly made by UTAS, so some people call it the UTAS-15) being inescapable this month.

We want that guy’s publicist. Of course, if he was really on the ball, he’d have sent a press packet to WeaponsMan.com.

Second, the American Rifleman has two really cool articles embedded in it. It almost didn’t get read, because instead of the UTS-15 or any other gun, they put a politician on the cover (ptui!). But those two articles are worth flipping it open for One is just a one-pager (in the “I have this old gun…” feature) on the Smith .38-44 Heavy Duty