Weapons Man

As we said back in 2012: “Sure, some people celebrate another Civil Rights King this day.” But we’re suckers for the late Rodney’s message: “Can’t we all just get along?” We celebrated that great American again in 2013 (he passed away between our two Rodney King Day posts), and we’ll be celebrating him, we hope, for years to come. Because Rodney King Day is second only to Dead Che Day as an alternative holiday around the weapons locker.

Rodney King had a difficult and hard life, and came to a sad end — these facts are as near as Google, and as significant as the wisp of wind that comes and goes. For his message will live on.  That golden, American message that came out when some reporter was trying to get him on record as encouraging riots that took place in his name.

“Can’t we all just get along?”

Of course we can. Mostly. But for the times when we just can’t, well, there’s always weaponsman.com. Se

So along comes Andrew Cuomo (D- with some comments about the groups he’d like to ethnically, politically, or otherwise permanently cleanse from his New York.

We’re not sure who, exactly, but he sure reminds us of another politician of Italian extraction.

He said, that Republican Party candidates who were running against the SAFE Act, and that people, “who are right to life, pro assault weapon… they have no place in the state of New York.”

The New York Post interpreted this as “Cuomo to conservatives: Leave NY!” The Cuomo administration accused the Post of “distorting” the words of Il Duce, but even according to their telling, the Post’s quotes (if not the headline, which is certainly implied in Cuomo’s words) are dead-on accurate.

Apparently the Post’s offense was to tell the public what Il Commendatore actually said.

Of course, it&#821

Foreground: HK MR w/FHMB. Background: with BPR in place.

One of the great things about SF is the way you learn a lot of skills. For example, if you went to the old O&I school, you got an excellent and in-depth intensive course in taking first class documentary photographs. We regret that the old teammate who took these photos is not a graduate of that course. In fact, even though he’s now in the industry and was at SHOT, he was our team medic– and a very good one.

At the SHOT Show recently, HK’s new MR556-SD and MR762-SD, which exploit new suppressor technology from Utah-based OSS (Operators Suppressor Systems), caught his eye, and he snagged us a few cellphone shots.

You know that 60s expression, “I can dig it?”

Winter over in New England and that will be part of your regular workout regime.

OK, so it’s week 3 of a new year, and we’re already behind on the weekly wraps (this is being written Sunday, not Saturday, night; and the movie review was nearly 24 hours late, too.

As a result this post is going to be on the perfunctory side.  We just want to get it out of the draft queue, over the transom, and then kick back on Rodney King Day. Except we’ll have our usual schedule of posts.

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

Our article count was 25, down from last week’s record 30. Word count actually went up with around 20,000 words. Five of the posts were over 1,000 words, down from six, but this time all of them were over 1,500, with two falling just short of 2,000 words, which is really kind of long for a net piece.

The mean and median post sizes were 823 and 632 respectively, each one about 200 higher than last week’s numbers. This week, lack of short posts

Fight’s on. Axe, Danny and Marcus are all wounded, but still in the fight…

By now, everybody knows the story. A 4-man SEAL Strategic Reconnaissance (SR) team is compromised on target, and the running and gunning commences. Outnumbered fifty to one, all of them wounded, their desperate situation takes a turn for the worse when the Quick Reaction Force chopper is shot down. Three of the SEALs are killed, and the fourth — the Lone Survivor himself, Marcus Luttrell — saves himself by stealth and boldness, and only then is saved in turn, by an Afghan villager who refuses to turn him over to the Taliban: as a helpless, wounded man, he fell under the principle of Nanawatai, one of the undisputed facets of the tribal code of the Pathans, Pushtunwali. 

And if you haven’

The TSA, America’s least competent government agency, continues to seek new fields for its trademark alternative to competence, rather than address its existing problems. The corrupt agency’s latest power grab, last week, bestowed on its low-integrity and even-lower-intellect staff the “right” to conduct warrantless, no-notice raids on repair shops where airplanes and their components are fixed.

Having alienated the traveling public, they’re now moving on to deal with the menace of terrorists from stealing airplanes off the aviation equivalent of the Jiffy Lube lot. The last time this happened… well, it actually hasn’t happened yet, so the payroll patriots of the TSA are stepping in to screw up the in-maintenance aircraft the terrorists have so resolutely resisted screwing up. (Terrorists, after all, are sly and cunning and bear considerable watching).

In the decade since the creation of the TSA, its agents have never caught a terrorist or prevented an attack. Instead, they’ve stolen millions from passe

Look Ma, no hammer! Full Size P320. They’re initially available in 9mm and .40, soon to be in .45, and the SIG-SAUER site is contradictory on whether the .357 SIG is available now, or RSN.

SIG has now cataloged the P320. Unfortunately, the website launches an autoplay video. It’s a good video, in our view, but we’d rather have a say on when something comes blaring out of our speakers. Anyway, if you can give it a listen, the page is here, with the two versions of the pistol on it — just expect the video to automatically pop-up. Once the video’s over, you can dig into the specs and the details about the guns.

We’ll reproduce some of it here, and in between paragraphs and after SIG says their piece, we’ll have some comments. 

Introducing the P320, a polymer-framed service

We’ve gotten the word about another SF Soldier who’s been welcomed into Valhalla. May the mead flow as stirring tales of great deeds echo in the hall. We shall be taking a drink in his memory, shortly. It seems like The Thing to Do.

Lee enlisted as an infantryman in the U.S. Army in October 2007, completing his initial entry training at Fort Benning, Ga.  His first assignment was with the 2nd Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment, at Fort Lewis, Wash.  While serving as a scout with the 1st Cav. Reg., Lee deployed to Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2009.  Upon his return, Lee volunteered for Special Forces Assessment and Selection.

Lee start

…so that we could watch the new Fox TV series “Enlisted,” is this: then, you watch the damn tube from time to time, and who has the time for that?

Anyway, we watched the President’s speech on surveillance, live. Very brief take-aways:

1. It was just a speech, another TelePrompTer drill. He seems unwilling to expose himself to questioning on this.
2. His recounting of the history of this surveillance seemed accurate, and he was fairly bold in his defense of the Intelligence Community professionals in the case.
3. His half-measures will please no one. They depend on the legitimacy of the FISA court and the Attorney General. By now everyone understands that the FISA Court is a rubber-stamp
   Star Chamber, with no more credibility than any “People’s Court” in history where the results were neither in question nor dependent on evidence. And the AG has been a leader in the movement to subordinate the law to a system of heiararchical prvileges.
4. The Press will be wowed by his speech — he could have read random pages of Ulysses, for all they care — but the public will not be, and in particular, foreign nations will not because of his assertion that the US will continue to spy on the communications of friends and allies because ‘