Weapons Man

Memorial to the Greek resistance fighters of WWII. Despite the warm public memory, it was a mess at times. Even amid the war, Communist, republican and royalist resistance movements fought one another, sometimes making alliances with the Nazi occupation forces to settle scores. This was not a good foundation for postwar stability.

The main story of World War II will always be the great clashes of armies — ships in the sea, men in France, tanks in the deserts and on the steppes. But unconventional warfare played a vital part in the war, and insurgencies were particularly important in peripheral theaters — in the Pacific, in the Philippines and Burma, and in Europe, in Greece, Yugoslavia, Norway and Denmark.

This does not mean that unconventional warfare was useless in major theaters. Both the Russians and the Western Allies took advantage of resistance movements in the enemies’ rear ar

First, we’ll show you an ad generated and paid for with your tax dollars (except for our overseas readers… however, we’re sure you can find examples of dumb things your governments do). Then, we’ll tell you where this ad was placed.

Yes, that was placed by the National Counterintelligence Executive on the back cover (i.e. premium ad spot) of The Intelligencer: Journal of Foreign Intelligence Studies, the house publication of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO). Given that retired and former intelligence personnel are frequently employed for their skills, access and clearances, usually by contractors doing sensitive government work, it makes sense that NCIX would try to send them this update to the old Loose Lips Sink Ships posters that notes that criminal gangs, too, want that same expertise. (There are several ads else

This is a very long post, and it hasn’t even got any pictures. Accordingly, we’ve put most of it past the “more” button. The two controversies we address are first, did Jake Tapper of CNN insult Marcus and the dead SEALS in his interview (we say no, although we understand Marcus took it that way). And second, did the SEALs blunder to their own doom, as a number of critics, most of them with Marine connections, have charged? We spend a lot of time on the second controversy examining the criticisms of a retired Marine blogger, Herschel Smith’s, former Marine Infantryman son, Daniel. We think the criticism is credible in small part, but in larger part results from a difference in perspective and experience.

You’ve been warned… click over at your own risk.

CNN’s Jake Tapper, the nearest thing that struggling channel has to an actual newsman, got crossthreaded with Marcus Luttrell on the subject of Lone Survivor. Tapper said something about “senseless American death” and Luttrell bristled: “We spend our whole lives defending this country so you tell me because we were over there doing what we were told to do was senseless and they died for nothing?”

J

The resemblance to Plaintiff #2 is uncanny. Well, before she put on the weight….

Rent-seeking plutocrats, redefined as kids’ action figures: The Kronies. Ariel Stryker, representing the military-industrial complex, at left, in her animated version (there’s also an action-figure).

Rather than embed the video, go to the site and see the whole cast of The Kronies, in a note-perfect kids’-toy commercial parody. May be the most clever bit of visual propaganda hat you will see this year. (It’s an election year, so you will see a lot of propaganda, and most of it will just make you hate all the candidates, even the ones you hold your nose and vote for in the end). This parody website and video goes a long way to explaining exactly why you hate all the candidates,

Sure, when seconds count, they’re only 74 minutes away. But hey, there’s no better upholder of law and order than the police, right?

How about these police?

Mexico has disarmed more than 1,200 local police officers suspected of colluding with drug traffickers in Michoacan state and arrested 38 members of the notorious Knights Templar drug cartel active in the region.

[Monte Alejandro Rubido Garcia, a top federal security official], said federal forces have taken control of 27 municipalities in the western Mexico state and disarmed 1,209 of the local police officers.

Hey just a few…. thousand… bad apples. But surely the federal police are on the side of the public?

Well, it wasn’t the corruption in the state of Michoacan that turned out the F

Thanks to the generosity of show creator Kevin Bieger (and his assistant Colin Whitman), we’ve seen tonight’s episode in a preliminary review version. We missed tipping you to last week’s episode, Randy Get Your Gun, and apologize to the show folks, but the ones who missed out were you guys — the episode  was both fun, and sweet. We don’t want to throw spoilers out there — in this day and age, people can catch up with that last episode. But it turned on the youngest brother Randy and his difficulties qualifying with his M4 and one end of the skill scale, while the competition, and therefore tension, between platoon sergeants Hill and Perez was dialed up a notch — with both coming across as good and conscientious. 

The qualification wasn’t especially realistic (unlike, say, the barrac

Sorry about the title. In-joke. But hey, there’s a new tripod in town, and it works with the M2HB and M2A1 machine guns and also the Mk19 grenade launcher. This is kind of big news, because the M3 it replaces was type-classified in 1934. FDR was president, most of the world’s fighter planes were canvas-covered biplanes, and the armed services were roiled with debate over whether such newfangled ideas as multiengine bomber aircraft, tank and motorized forces making independent breakthroughs, and aircraft carriers would ever really catch on.

The Spanish Civil War, where all those things except carriers would get a thorough shakedown, was in the future. So was the Italian campaign in Abyssinia. Most of the babies born in 1934 are now on the Social Security Death List… so maybe it’s time for the venerable M3 tripod to join them. The new ‘pod is called the M205 and it borrows a couple of ideas from foreign tripods, plus a few twists of its own, to save 16 pounds.

At 34 pounds, the new M205 is 16 pounds lighter than the 50-pound M3 Tripod. The tripod also has an integrated Traverse & Elevation (T&E) mechanism that allows fas

Bob Owens has a little more on the Janorris Hughes / Mickie Shaffer case, which bemused us this week.

Bob also has the sentencing of the Mayors Against Guns member who tried to resolve the breakup of his May-December gay tryst with a gun. He’s off to jail for 10-to-20 — months, unfortunately.  

We’re going to start a new policy with next week’s W4 (Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week). Since we’ve been doing W4s since the very dawn of this blog on 1/1/2012, along with next week’s W4, we’ll look back at the nominees from last year and the year before (where available. Not every week has an entry).

Because we didn’t start doing this until Week 5 of 2014, we have a few Back W4s to catch up on, and we listed ‘em here.

Our original W4 is h

Two Boston politicians: fake Indian (l.) and real felon (r.)

Carlos Henriquez, who represents the criminals and their families in Boston’s violent Dorchester neighborhood, is a man of the people now: his people. The felons. You could say — and Boston Herald smart aleck Howie Carr does — that he’s now a man of substantial convictions.

Assault and battery, two counts. For beating and choking a woman. We leave what he was hoping to get from her as an exercise for the reader; in won’t-issue-unless-you’re-connected Dorchester/Boston, Henriquez knew she was defenseless, and acted accordingly.

Carr:

Carlos Henriquez (D-Dorchester) got the bad news — a jury convicted him of two counts of assaulting a 20-something woman in the summer of 2012.

Another casualty in the Democrats’ relentless “War Against Women.”

I know you’re as shocked as

From Ireland, a Victim Disarmament Zone (that hasn’t worked all that well) since the British conquest, a story of bizarre violence that begins with a disagreement over, of all things, a chess move.

Saverio Bellante, 34, was charged Monday with murder. Police say he admitted his guilt after being arrested Sunday at the home he shared with Tom O’Gorman, a policy researcher for a conservative Catholic think tank in Ireland.

Pathologists said the 39-year-old victim suffered dozens of severe knife wounds to his head and chest, which had been cut fully open. Ireland’s senior pathologist determined that the heart remained, but a lung was missing.

Police offered no explanation for what happened to the lung. Evidence suggested that O’Gorman’s prone head and body also were bludgeoned with a dumbbell.

Bellante called police to report the killing. He claimed to officers that he had cut open O’Gorman’s chest and tried to eat his heart

Someone’s been liquidating a collection of early Colt AR-15 Sporter SP1s for the last several months. The auctions are one-day auctions, so these particular numbers may have expired, but they’ll be relisted indefinitely if not sold. (If you’re more than a day or so behind, this link shows all that seller’s auctions, then “narrow your search” to AR or SP-1).

These guns differ in considerable detail from contemporary M16s, but they have their own collector following. They include:

• Number 628:

This is one of the earliest SP1s in circulation, and a rare one in this condition. It is a three-digit-serial number, after all, of a weapon that has been produced in the millions.

The

Janoris Hughes, career criminal, 1992-2013. “One home invasion too many.”

Here’s a synopsis of a confusing case, which we’ll try to clarify for you.

• Setting: Mickie Shaffer’s home in Fayetteville, PA. Christmas morning, early.
• Actor #1: Mickie Shaffer, homeowner
• Actor #2: Terry Fulton, house resident
• Actor #3: Janoris Hughes, recently released (paroled?) violent criminal, 21, and already a fugitive from justice in Chambersburg, PA. Hughes’s Facebook posts show him with stacks of money, aping gangsta poses with a gun.
• Actor #4: Matt Fogal, liberal DA with political aspirations.

HUGHES enters home unbidden with an “assault rifle” (how’d a felon get that?) and announces a robbery. FULTON fights with HUGHES. HUGHES fires the rifle wounding FULTON three times. HUGHES f

Living within the beaten zone of the Boston media has its benefits. (Wait, what benefits? Well… it has its, we dunno, let’s say features). It’s like being in a ringside seat for a prizefight where a fighter is being beaten to death, except that there’s no referee to stop the fight, and the prizefighter’s in there alone, beating himself up.

Actually, it’s like all that, when you don’t even care for boxing if it’s all on the up-and-up and done to strict Queensbury rules.

That place is a moral and ethical Superfund site. Evil dwells therein; evil grows there; evil finds the corrupted and corrupting nutrients it needs for its unnatural growth cycle. Evil like this:

Meet Robert Kosilek. He wants to be called Michelle, and dresses like a g

The story of World War II small arms production is fairly well known, the fabled “Arsenal of Democracy.” The degree to which American makers such as Winchester, Remington, and New England Westinghouse assisted allied armies in World War II with guns like the 1895 musket, Pattern 14 Enfield, and M1891 Mosin-Nagant rifle is also familiar, at least to avid students of old guns. But the immense and violent surge of production mechanization that attended the US Civil War in the North — and that laid the foundation for postwar consumer goods and machinery production — is less known. This rudely formatted, but information-dense page tells some of the story:

In retrospect, it is ironic that the North was taken so by surprise, and so unprepared for conflict. South Carolina had voted to secede on December 20th, 1860; by February 9th, 1861, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, Loui

In the previous post, we referred to Dagestan, which may take some finding for some of you, as it isn’t on international maps. It’s located on the west side of the Caspian Sea, adjacent to the Islamist nightmare insurgency of Chechnya (Russian Federal forces have the upper hand in Chechnya’s aptly-named capital of Grozny, but Chechen terrorists cause problem both at home and in a worldwide terrorist diaspora that’s led to us whacking large quantities of them in Afghanistan and even Iraq). Dagestan, too, seethes with sub rosa Islamist resistance.

The Boston Marathon bombers were Dagestani (and the Russian security organs warned the USA about them, but the Napolitano era DHS and the FBI ignored the warnings due to their focus on American political opposition.

Russian people and culture dominate the seaside urban areas, but since the closing days of the USSR, the interior has come increasingly under the sway of Salafi/Wahhabi Islam.

The very useful site Kaukaz.net has

Everybody knows about Russian arms: simple, straightforward, peasant-conscript brute-force stuff, just like the Red Army itself: the AK-47, the iron Hero of the Soviet Union, which did more to spread Marxism than the bookish, nerdy and introverted Marx ever imagined. Right?

Ah.. how ’bout wrong? Russia is today a great, continental power with a large fraction of smart people, a fraction of whom are brilliant engineers, and a faction of those engaged in making small arms for particular purposes. Like Western counterterrorist forces, Russian CT elements — who have plenty of terrorists to counter — use a mix of standard government-issue, and special purpose, arms. Consider what we can learn from a careful look at this picture:

This picture was purportedly taken on the streets of Makhachkala, the capital of the autonomous region of Dagestan in the Caucasus region of south Russia, as the Russian authorities found, and whacked, terrorist leader Eldar Magatov in Dagestan’s Babyurt region. They’re now seeking

At the SHOT Show, they set up a “New Product Center” where showgoers could see what was new, and scan their badge (as we understand it) and the product’s code to connect themselves with further information. Here’s what was hot as of mid-show (which should include all major product introductions: the dynamics of trade shows are such that all the major intros are frontloaded on the first day or two):

Begin quote from NSSF, these are presumably in popularity order:

1. Caldwell AR-15 Mag Charger by Battenfeld Technologies
   “The AR-15 Mag Charger is the new definition of speed loader. It loads all types of AR magazines in seconds.”
2. Element Case by Hogue
   “Tactical line of iPhone 5/5s cases.”
3. Sticky Kydex by Sticky Holsters
   “In the waistband holster with no clips – new Sticky Kydux.”
4. RAC BAG/Trunk Mount by U.S. RAC
   “New RAC Trunk Mount is a innovative mounting device for AR-15, MP4′s, MP5′s, shotguns and all rifles.”
5. RDB/M43 by Kel-Tec CNC Industries Inc.
   “Kel-Tec has solved the main disadvantage of bullpup rifles: case ejection. The RDB/M43 features downward ejection.”

End quote; begin our comments again. 

There are many like it:

But this one was his, and for years it was lost and forgotten, but one day it will be on display.

It’s an ordinary Colt Model 945, M16A4 rifle, but this one belonged to a hero. Marine Sergeant Rafael Peralta died clutching that rifle. From a Virginia newspaper:

Months after the first battle of Fallujah, U.S. troops and Iraqi forces descended on the city about 45 miles west of Baghdad to regain control, making door-to-door searches to clear the area of insurgents.

Peralta, a Mexican immigrant who enlisted the same day he received his Green Card in 200

As we reported, Chris has a new novel out, at least in the ebook formats. Damn his eyes. So if you’re wondering where this morning’s post was, which this post is hastily being subbed in for (hours late; we’ll backdate it to 0600, when a post should have run), it’s all the fault of the Texican cop and citizen-soldier turned novelist.

Worse, we wasted valuable book-reading time texting with him last night so that’s all his fault too.  

We have said before that Chris’s Proof of Our Resolve is the best novel out of the Afghan War, period, full stop (and yes, we are mindful of the great The Kite Runner, a marvellous book but an Afghan view after all). This new book — which we’re not done with yet — (did we say, “damn his eyes?” why yes, we did) — further develops Jerry Nunez’s character and puts him in a terrible predicament, reminding us of the sort of jams the Coen Brothers put their movie characters

How’d we miss this, indeed? Chris has been promising the new book (and teasing excerpts of it) for some time, so it’s kind of big news that it’s out as an ebook (paperback to follow in due course, but who can wait that long?). We’ve bought it already, but we wanted to tell all y’all (how’re we doing on a TX language code, Chris?) before we stuck our nose in the Kindle app until it’s done.

You may recall that we called Chris’s Proof of Our Resolve the best novel of the Afghan war. We haven’t read anything since then to change our mind. In this novel, Jerry Nuñez is back from the war and onto his usual life as a fulltime cop and part-time National Guardsman — when the borderlands explode.

This coming Saturday, January 18th, barring any unforeseen circumstances, my new novel Line in the Valley will be released by Tactical16 Publishing. As with my last book, it