Weapons Man

If California is the laboratory of gun control, and Chicago and DC the purest consequences, Boston is its intellectual and moral center.

1. Boston foundations finance much of it; ancient fortunes amassed by whaling, war-profiteering and slave trading not only produced de facto perpetual trusts, but simultaneously imbued their possessors with original, unexpiable white guilt;
2. Boston colleges and universities provide what intellectual underpinning the movement has, and are an endless regeneration pool for defeated anti-gun politicians; they also inculcate their young charges with the same “white guilt” cant;
3. Boston NGOs are another bolt hole for pols retired for the sort of ill health that results from the voters getting sick of you, and are aces at spending Other People’s Money to achieve narrow political ends;
4. Boston hospitals and health establishments, including the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, have been key to opening the medical front in the war on guns; and,
5. Boston’s shallow

File image — this guy is NOT the murderer! (Unless there’s one hell of a coincidence afoot).

One more husband (on his way to being that staple of the police blotter, the ‘estranged husband’) is a no-go at the Anger Management station.

A man charged with fatally stabbing his wife in a Northeast Washington apartment had been arguing with her over an unpaid cable bill, which led to a violent confrontation, according to court papers filed in D.C. Superior Court on Monday.

A friend found the body of Claudia Hall, 51, on Friday lying on her bed in her residence in the 300 block of 18th Place NE. Police said she had been stabbed in the abdomen and choked, and was pronounced dead at the scene. It was the District’s first homicide of 2014.

The day before, police officers had found Hall’s husband, Alphonso Cleveland, 52, lying face down on a street in N

We were going to write about the Iran “deal,” but it’s too depressing — kind of like the “deal” le Marechal Pétain cut with les sales Boches. So let’s talk, instead, of the United States Marine Corps, and their two-plus centuries of highly nuanced protocol and diplomacy.

The Marines are a welcoming bunch. Over the years, they’ve welcomed millions of youths, and, frankly, boys, ready or not, into manhood. They’ve welcomed themselves to real estate the original owners had every intention of keeping private, from the Barbary coast to Fallujah. They’ve also welcomed millions of enemies across the River Styx to the Underworld. So this welcome sign, erected by a current or former Marine, isn’t exactly a surprise; it stands stolidly amid centuries of Marine tradition.

Now, let us get this straight: do what with his lawn?

The first combat weapon associated in the gun culture’s hive mind with plastic stocks? No question, it’s the AR-15. But the AR-15 wasn’t first. Before making its AR-15 prototypes, Armalite, then of Hollywood, California, made the stocks for the AR-10 — and stocks for even earlier sporting guns.

While Armalite claims the mindshare, it wasn’t the first by any means. As early as World War II, Springfield Armory developed a phenolic plastic stock for the BAR that was used on production guns beginning some time in 1944. It also made experimental Garand stocks, and would probably have made production stocks, or farmed their production out to industry, for the millions of M1s that would have been needed for the invasion of the Japanese home islands.

But Springfield was trying to do something different from what Armalite was after. The national armory wanted another material for stocks that would be stronger at the same weight. It was not until late in the M14 project that Springfield managers realized that fiber-reinforced plastic enabled them to make stocks with equivalent strength to close-grained walnut, but at much lighter weight.

While Springfield Armory backed into the discovery that composite stocks could safe weight,

Unless you’re a misanthrope, you’ve probably noticed your reflection in your spouse, lover’s, or child’s eyes. Turns out, those reflections are visible in photographs, too; academics from two British universities, Robert Jenkins and Christine Kerr, were able to extract identifiable photos from these reflections, like this:

While they couch this in terms of criminal investigation, its real utility is probably to camera-saturated, totalitarian surveillance states — as Britain itself is becoming. The entire paper is online at PLOS ONE, a peer reviewed free journal. A numerically-cleansed (for readers’ convenience) abstract:

Criminal investigations often use photographic evidence to identify suspects. Here we combined robust face perception and high-resolution photography to mine face photographs for hidden information. By zooming in on high-re

Welcome to England, a bucolic island where burglars know it’s safe to burglarize occupied homes, where police and prosecutors side with the burglars, and where the 1996 ban on handguns is so airtight that the British Olympic shooters take the Chunnel to France to practice. In a gun-controller’s paradise like that, it should be evident that all problems of violent crime, suicide, and antisocial behavior have been solved.

Right?

Emergency services rushed to a house in Haywards Heath, West Sussex and apparently found the man hanging from a bedroom window with blood pouring from wounds to his groin.

Police confirmed they entered the house in the early hours of Sunday 29 December and found the 46-year-old mother, who had phoned 999. Both were rushed to hospital with what were described as life-threatening – and in the man’s case, self-inflicted – wounds.

“999″ is in Britain what “911″ is in North America, an all purpose emergency number. It

The once-popular science fiction author Robert Heinlein, like many of his contemporaries, has fallen into a bit of a valley in popularity. As Baby Boomers took over the institutions, the frontier self-reliance of Heinlein and his heroes became passé; instead, too late to do Philip K. Dick any good, Dick’s antisocial hippie ethos ruled, spawning many movies and even more wannabes with all of Dick’s attitude and none of his talent.

So what interest has a gun blog in Heinlein? It keys on our interest in crime and punishment. As it turns out, once upon a time (in early 1955, to be specific, when cars other than Cadillacs were yet to grow proper tailfins), he wrote a letter to fellow science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, to help Sturgeon overcome writer’s block. In it, he offered, generously, selflessly even, many ideas; one that stuck in Sturgeon’s mind for years was, “Ghost of a little cat patting around eternity looking for a familiar lap to sit in.” (Heinlein’s actual words: “A little cat ghost, padding patiently around in limbo, trying to find that familiar, friendly lap…” so Sturgeon remembered it with remarkable clarity).

In his letter, one of the ideas Heinlein posits is a very, very libertarian approach to law and order; it was one of the mor

Sunday, went out to the range with Kid. Engaged targets at 50m (not our choice. Target frames embedded in ice). Your humble WeaponsMan was firing mostly the Glock (and still struggling to group with it) and Kid mostly a Valmet M62S. Normally we’d only bring one rifle and one pistol to a given range session, in order to maintain focus and maximize training benefit; Sunday we brought an extra handgun (which we’ll explain below).

We also saw, this weekend, bricks of .22 in stock for (ouch)  $70. Not so great ammunition, either: Aquila. But it was the first time in a long time we’ve seen ‘em in stock. After checking on prices online, when we factor shipping in, we’re better off buying it locally.

Of course, buying more .22 means someone is going to have to troubleshoot the old High Standard. Back when we last could get ammo, it was having some going-bang-consistently problems, and it shouldn’t — it’s a pretty simple blowback gun.

We’d cleaned it inadequately last time (boo, hiss). We discovered when the bolt didn’t want to open, but seemed to be welded shut. This is a fault (if a problem caused by poor PM is really a “fault”) of Valmets and Galils (which are Valmet-based) more so than regular AKs, and here’s

Well, actually, the problem’s from stumbling Friday whilst shoveling snow, and landing one’s entire mass upon a kneecap. Two takeaways so far:

1. Fiftysomething doesn’t heal like twentysomething, and,
2. One needs to reduce one’s entire mass if he’s going to do things like this with it.

Anyway, another week begins and last week’s TW3 is not up (although we did get a Matinee up, so there is that).

We plead exigent circumstances — attempts to take Kid to Lone Survivor failed due to the popularity of the film (Sold Out!!) so we killed time in a gun shop until a later show. (Kids are not born with knowledge, they must be educated. Kinda like their elders that way). He’s not even my kid, he’s kind of a loaner from an ex, but one feels responsible.

Lone Survivor? Yes, a review is coming this week, but we’ll give you our exit line now: It was not only better than we expected, but better than we hoped. Go see it.

• Received something from our local Senator who’s up for re-pop this year, and she is at once celebrating the economic recovery (did you see any economic recovery? In Washington, they apparently did) and determined to increase the duration of extended unemployment ben

It wasn’t exactly a New Year’s Resolution, but we are doing better at getting our stuff out on time. So there is that.

This week produced a lot of material and comment, including three solid tech articles and a SHOT Show prospectus. We’ve already heard from SHOT-bound friends (and are just kind of greening up with envy, thank you very much).

The links are live; to find the posts scroll down. Enjoy!

Our article count was 30 — we believe that’s a new record — and word count was around 19,000 words. Six of the posts were over 1,000 words, again, but this time only two were over 1,500, although one of those was a 3,000 word monster (A Short History of Chrome Bores).

The mean and median post sizes were 629 and 454 respectively, functionally equivalent to last week’s numbers. This spread between mean and median suggests a mean average pushed higher by a few long posts. There was only one sub-

In 1900, nascent nationalism in China, in the form of a group called the Righteous and Harmonious Fists, turned grievances against foreign exploiters (the word sounds dreadfully Marxist, but in this case it fits), and commitment to Chinese martial arts, into a national rebellion. The foreign diplomatic community, with their small legation guard forces, found themselves holed up in a walled Peking enclave with teeming millions of hostile Chinese surrounding them. The Imperial court tried to play both sides off, but came down ultimately on the side of the Boxers. The Chinese attack brought together an unusual eight-power alliance with all the major European powers plus the US and Japan

Charles Manson better look to his laurels. There’s a new kid in town.

California. Land of fruits and nuts, of Jim Jones and Charles Manson, Richard Ramirez, the Hillside Strangler and the Zodiac killer. Now we have a guy who seems to have confused The Exorcist with Horror of Dracula and tried to drive the stake through the priest.

A man charged with murder in the death of a California priest in a church rectory beat him with a wooden stake and rusty metal pipe then made two unsuccessful attempts to set the body and building on fire, police said in a court document obtained Wednesday.

Suspect Gary Lee Bullock rolled up the body of the Rev. Eric Freed in blankets and doused them with liquor before he tried to set them on fire, according to the police affidavit obtained by The Associated Press.

It said Bullock then tried to blow up the rectory of St. Bernard Catholic Churc

We used to have a more clever name for this exercise in clearing the browser tabs, but we can’t remember it. (So it was deathlessly clever, wasn’t it? The older we get, the better we was).

We might do a longer post on this some time soon, but for now, we’ll let the chart do the talking. National totals of silencer Form 4s, over the last few years. Hmmm, a trend. Note that one single form 4 ≠ one single silencer. It might, but multiple cans can be (and are, especially to dealers) transferred on a single F4. Also, one silencer may generate multiple Form 4s (although with ATF NFA Branch backlog running as long as nine months, there won’t be two entries in one year). The state breakdown of this dataset was also interesting. Texas alone accounts for over 20% of silencer Form 4s, and Florida is a distant second. Michigan just legalized them for 2012; some states still ban this important piece of safety equipment.

“Who is crazy, you or me?” She wasn’t expecting this answer.

Like the famous judicial definition of porn, we know a responsible gun use when we see one. And this ain’t it.

A domestic dispute over space aliens escalated Saturday morning when a lingerie-clad New Mexico woman allegedly pointed a silver handgun at her boyfriend, a weapon she retrieved from her vagina, where it had been placed while the accused was performing a sex act, police allege.

As detailed in a probable cause statement, Jennifer McCarthy, a 48-year-old artist, argued about space aliens with her 53-year-old beau, whose name was redacted from the document released by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office. When questioned by deputies, McCarthy reportedly acknowledged that she “did have a gun at the time” the c

Guys & gals, the crew of Enlisted messaged us after we wrote about their show. We’ve sent ’em an email back, but don’t expect to hear in a hurry — because their show premieres tonight on the Fox broadcast network.

We literally never watch broadcast TV, unless we’re hanging with our tube-happy parents,  but at 9 PM Eastern tonight we’re making an exception. It’s going to be really weird to see commercialsl; normally we watch only DVD stuff, the kind of archival material we offer up here,.

What we’re going to look for is, mostly, this: is it funny? Do I like these characters enough to spend some time with ‘em? We’re not expecting this to be a documentary of military life, because the cast and crew already warned us that they didn’t get the message on accuracy until they had several episodes in the can (does anybody say “in the can” any more? Meaning, this is all digital, right, these days, so there is no “can”? Or do the cans have a union that

Kelvion Walker shows what he was doing when shot. “Why’d you shoot me?” he screamed after getting plugged with a single shot.

…it kind of depends on where you’re a cop. In Dallas, a 12-year veteran police officer who made a questionable decision to shoot an unarmed citizen was shown the door on December 30th. Chief David Brown took the unusual action after reviewing the circumstances of the shooting.

This is a pretty rare decision, no matter how egregious the conduct of the shooting cop is. (For example, New York never considered firing the cops who wounded 9 bystanders in Manhattan last year).

What is it with the damned hammers already?

Eliseo Rosendo Altamirano had been at a party in the 2400 block of Wyoming Street on the East Side that ran deep into the morning of New Year’s Day.

Sometime before 9 a.m., police say, there was an argument and another man was killed.

“There were two men sitting there, and they had been drinking all night,” said Sandy Gutierrez, SAPD spokeswoman. “One of them then took a sledgehammer and hit the victim over the head several times, killing him.”

via Disabled man killed by sledgehammer first homicide of 2014 – San Antonio Express-News.

The victim was Albert Gonzalez, 27. His relation if any to Altamirano was unknown.

We might be a little slow responding to comments, etc. today. 1. We’re busy, and 2. It’s jeezly cold here. Not just here. Reuters had a shot of a frozen American side of Niagara falls. (the Canadian side is still flowing. Canadian water is more used to the cold).

Because people like us might confuse the different concepts “weather” and “climate,” and question people like the Nittany Kiddie Diddlers’ genius of climate science, Michael “Piltdown” Mann, they include several archival shots of past freezes. Here’s one with a helicopter:

A Bell helicopter (centre) flies over a partially frozen Niagara Falls in 1951

via

For a number of interred veterans in the Cheltenham, MD Veterans Cemetery, eternal rest wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. A combination of rain-soaked earth and a heavy backhoe tore up the grounds and dislodged a number of the headstones.

At a glance at the close-up (below right), it looks like the headstones were knocked over, but these are the sort that are made to lie flat; the machine just knocked some of them out of alignment.

The dead appeared to take the insult in stride (or perhaps, “in repose,”) but the same can’t be said for their relatives.

“It’s just disgraceful,” said Carol Milliken.

Her husband, a major in the U.S. Air Force, was buried there last year. She comes to vis

What’s coming at SHOT? First, the answer to “What’s Going to SHOT?” appears not to include “weaponsman.com.” Our plan was to be there, but reality intervened. We’re going somewhere else instead. Eh, that’s canc’d. We’re going nowhere! We’ll be on reachback for the guys on the trip.

Without further ado, here is what we’d be expecting to see if we were there. Of course, the most interesting stuff is the stuff you were not expecting, but we can hardly preview that. By alphabetical order:

They have a sniper system chassis (which also gives benefits to hunters, even though a lot of committed Fudds don’t want them) that fits the Remington 700 and (here’s the big splash, in our view) the Savage 110. The Savage is an extremely accurate gun that gets overlooked for law enforcement precision rifleman jobs because it’s not what (pick one: Tier Zero SOF, FBI Hostage Arson Team, some assclown who does YouTube training videos) uses. Maybe putting the Savage in sniper drag will help. If you’re building a precision rifle on a budget, saving money on the action and spending it on the optic will often pay off. And if your email