Weapons Man

It was a gamble: would audiences go to a movie that was entirely in an obscure language? Well, it worked once for Mel Gibson with Passion of the Christ, so why not a pre-Columbian one-man-against-the-world epic?

Audiences didn’t give it much of a chance. It struggled to make back its $40 million production budget, which is a damned shame, as it’s a thriller that will keep your eyes open as the hero overcomes the loss of his friends, father, and village, separation from his pregnant wife and young son, and consignment to sacrifice by the Mayan Empire, not to mention being hunted by a gang of thoroughly believable bad guys intent on bringing about the sacrifice that was so rudely interrupted.

Jaguar Paw (played by American Indian actor Rudy Youngblood; many of the actors are of native descent) is the natu

Lift bridges? The video tells the tale.

How many more must die, before we address the assault bridge menace? No one was crushed in lift bridges when we used common-sense river-crossing technology, like fords and ferries. Or just stayed on our own side!

If it saves even one life, it’s worth it.

We mentioned Magpul’s yank on the eject handles of its Colorado home yesterday. Today, we’ll show you how non-fans of John W. Hickenlooper are gunning (figuratively) for the anti-gun Governor — on his own Facebook page.

Now, we’re not real familiar with Facebook. This graphic can’t mean what it looks like it means: he’s welcoming more of his state’s former employers to the Lone Star State?

It’s tough to be Hickenlooper right now, and we’d probably have sympathy for him if he hadn’t brought the whole edifice down upon himself by his own hand. He’s just seen three of his Senate allies go down out-of-season for following his anti-gun lead. Two were taken out by voters, and one given a figurative Luger-and-one-round by her fellow Democrats, so that Hickenlooper could name another anti-gunner to her seat (which he did, all the while saying, “I support the 2nd Amendment, but…” which everyone knows means,

Grainy photo of two of the slain sicarios. Two AKs with drum mags, one appears tp have an M203. F&F guns? Click to embiggen. Source: Borderland Beat.

In December 18, at Puerto Penãsco in Sonora, Mexico, a massive gunfight between cartel gunmen and Mexican officers left at least five people dead. At least one of the guns involved in the seacoast shootout was an AK clone supplied to the Mexican drug cartel by the BATFE. In addition, ATF whistleblower John Dodson has made it clear that the FBI has been funding this Iron River of weapons for violent criminals.

Borderland Beat has covered the actual shootout well. (Story,

“I didn’t do it, it was the human!”

You know you’ve really got the party started when impulse control fails all around. From then on, it’s all fun and games. Until someone gets her toe gnawed off.

A woman’s toe was bitten off during a fight at a raucous New Year’s Eve party in Dorchester, police said.

At about 5 a.m. Wednesday, officers received a call from Boston Medical Center reporting an assault and battery. The victim, whose name was not released, was attending a friend’s party when a fight broke out around 3 a.m., said Nicole Grant, Boston police spokeswoman.

The fight started after a victim approached a girl at the party and asked if she would like to “hook up,” the victim told police, according to Grant. The girl’s boyfriend was reportedly upset at the suggestion, grabbed the victim’s neck, and forcefully pulled her hair back. He eventually released

John Hickenlooper might be a failure as governor of Colorado, but they’ll say a few kind words about him at the next meeting of the Cheyenne, WY Chamber of Commerce. Hickenlooper’s anti-gun agenda has, as promised, driven Magpul Industries out of state, with most of the work (and jobs) making a rather short move to Cheyenne, and corporate headquarters moving to Texas.

Which Texas city’s Chamber of Commerce gets to send Hickenlooper the fruit basket is still unknown — the maker of magazines and accessories is working with Lone Star State authorities to select one of three shortlisted cities in north central Texas.

Magpul Industries, based in Erie, Colorado, announced Thursday that it was moving its production, distribution and shipping operations to Cheyenne and its headquarters to Texas, making good on a vow it made to leave Colorado during last year’s heated gun control debate.

In 2013, the company took out a newspaper ad stating it would leave should the state pass a ban on high-ca

Welcome to Newark, NJ, where there’s registration, licensing, an “assault weapons” ban, shall-issue-but-won’t licenses to carry, 15-round magazine limits, extra background checks, a hollow-point ban, NFA ban, and one-a-month-limits: essentially all the wish list of the modern police state with reference to gun control. Newark is also notorious for rejecting the McClure Volkmer Act (18 USC 926(a)) and jailing travelers, even those inadvertently in New Jersey through airline misfeasance, a position that’s been upheld by the state courts and the US 3rd Circuit.

This city-sized Victim Disarmament Zone seems to have a lot of unpossible crime. Newark ended 2013 with a 7-year murder record, thanks in part to the way one feral teen celebrated Christmas — by shooting three of his fellow men. Fox:

Authorities say a 15-year-old boy faces two coun

The Special Forces pipeline is simple and complicated. It’s simple, because all the potential SF trooper has to do is get himself to the starting point with his paperwork in order, do what he’s told, never quit, and go on to the next phase.

It’s complicated because the Army can’t resist applying Good Idea Fairy techniques to the order, structure, and number of the phases; and being the Army it has more ways to botch the paperwork that Uday Hussein had of killing people. But in the end, we gets our candidates into the top of the hopper, and we manage to shake a few of them out the bottom as qualified, tabbed, ready-to-join-a-team-and-learn SF soldiers.

For the workaday Active-Duty Army, a turn onto the road less traveled by, that is to say, to SF, begins with a personnel action request, which in our day was a paper form called a DA 4187. Assuming the candidate gets the prerequisites and paperwork (including a medical exam) all correct, it’s off to Camp Mackall outside Fort Bragg, where Special Forces Assessment & Selection takes place.

Extract from the log.

Dec. 31

11:36 p.m. — A caller on Bartlett Street reported her neighbors were partying hard.

Jan. 1

12:13 a.m. — Responded to a report of a man walking in the middle of the road.

12:20 a.m. — A caller reported an explosive sound coming from a Lafayette Road motel.

12:28 a.m. — Responded to a report of gun shots coming from an area of Lafayette Road.

12:53 a.m. — Took a report of a domestic disturbance on Deer Street.

via Portsmouth police log: Dec. 31-Jan. 1 | SeacoastOnline.com.

This was New Year’s Eve, for crying out loud, in a state that puts very few restrictions on fireworks. (Portsmouth, a favorite destination for relocating Bay Staters, does ban them). Of course, even New Hampshire has people who are dumb with fireworks on New Year’s Eve. This rocket surgeon thought it was fun to fire a roman candle at a cop car in Manchester.

So yeah, if you see a drunk in the middle of the street on New Year’s Eve you should probably call the cops for his safety. If you have a domestic beatin’ going on, that’s what the Po-Po is ther

What’s this, the fourth time in a few months?

Anyway, Alexis Valdez, 18 years old, come on down:

“The defendant’s behavior caused ongoing tension between the defendant and his aunt and the victim,” Assistant State’s Attorney Kingsley Sawyer told reporters.

Prosecutors said Valdez confessed to killing Diaz-Hernandez with a hammer, by hitting him several times in the head and smashing a hole in his skull.

Valdez allegedly used loud music and covered the apartment’s windows. He cut off the victim’s head, ears and nose and gouged out his eyes. He then placed the head on his aunt’s bed.
“He wanted to ‘leave his aunt a present,’” Sawyer said.

He also allegedly cut off Diaz-Hernandez’s left arm and mutilated the body.

After the murder, Valdez called 911 to report a dead body in the apartment. When the operator asked if he had attempted CPR, he laughed and said the body had no head.

That’s the word from dependable partisan hack Paul Pillar, speaking for Hillary 2016 and the staff of The National Interest. Selectively quoting from a report by dependable partisan hack David Kirkpatrick, working for Hillary 2016 at the New York Times, Pillar announced that yes, it was just dissatisfaction with a YouTube video.

If you make it to the second page of Pillar’s blog post, you’ll learn that well, maybe it was just general Islamic extremism, but because it wasn’t Al Qaeda as pillar envisions it, some kind of structure like the Armyt General Staff, it’s as if it never happened.

The Hillary Campaign’s Times’s report  bears Kirkpatrick’s byline, but seems, in classic Times fashion, to be mostly the work of barely-credited local stringers. Its purpose seems partly to rehabilitate the “spontaneous film criticism” story but primarily to rehabilitate various players in the foreign policy establishment, like Pillar’s fellow anti-semite Susan Rice and, of course, the Times’s standard-beare

The most brain-dead element of the New York soi-disant “SAFE” Act, the limit of 7 rounds per magazine to civilian handgun owners, has been overturned — by a generally anti-gun judge. The Federal judge, William M. Skretny, sustained the rest of the law as experts predicted he would, but overturned the 7-round limit. This could mean freedom for a number of unfortunates in the Empire State who’ve been charged with violating the arbitrary limit.

Andrew Branca, author of the book on The Law Of Self Defense, explains part of the significance of the ruling at Legal Insurrection:

He did, however, find that the provision that limits magazine capacity to only seven rounds was unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.

This seemingly small win for gun owners is actually very important.

Almost no semi-automatic pistols have 7-round magazines available.  Because semi-automatic pistols are the overwhelming preference for civilian self-defense–as well as for police and military use–the 7-round limit would have effectively banned the large majority of semi-automatic pistols on the market.  (Technically, one could use a large capacity magazine and only

Steve Yamamoto is — was — an employee of a Chicagoland grocery chain, Dominick’s. The chain is owned by Safeway, which never was able to make it profitable. So they pulled the plug. As the clock ran out on Dominick’s, Steve made this video with his co-workers and some digital-effects app (several YouTube commenters insist it was several different apps):

It’s all in good fun until someone puts your job out, and that’s just what Steve’s managers did — on the last day of the store’s existence. (It had the effect of screwing him out of his severance pay and giving them the option of giving him a bad reference — typical HR-shop passive-aggressive childishness).

Something tells us Steve will land on his feet.

Safeway? Not so much. Free publicity is usually good, except when it’s the kind of free publicity that stems from decisions made by room-temp-IQ personnel managers. Then it’s usually dreadful, and Steve Yamamoto’s springboard to 15 minutes of fame has been Safeway’s reputation, trodden underfoot and headed in the other direction.

Back in October, Cerberus Capital Man

Carson Daly and Natasha Leggero laugh at Pearl Harbor vets on NBC.

So, one of the benefits of not watching the boob tube is that you don’t know who Carson Daly is and he has to be explained to you. Apparently he became famous on a string of “reality shows” which is what people whose reality is insufficiently stimulating sit down and watch, presumably while breathing through their mouths.

Hey, it takes all kinds to make a world.

So this makes Daly, evidently, NBC’s go-to guy to host a telecast of New Year’s Eve festivities, for all the people whose lives are so narrow that they can only experience a celebration virtually through the screen.

This year his co-host was one Natasha Leggero. Our usual pop-culture explainers were lost and unable to explain her at all; presumably she was selected because she’s pretty,

Everyone knows about the example set by the Vietnam POWs, and a lot of people know about the stars on the walls in CIA HQ — the Agency’s equivalent of Arlington National Cemetery, except that some of the memorials have to be installed with unknown names. But the agency also has had its officers imprisoned, some of them for long periods of time.

In the 1960s, Mainland China was a Denied Area, one in which Americans — and Chinese agents working for the Americans — operated with great difficulty and at extreme hazard.

The only ways in were risky — hikes over great distances and inhospitable terrain patrolled by suspicious guards, rubber boats on remote coastline, parachute drops to unknown receptions.

The ways out were even more constrained. The equivalent of the parachute infiltration were the Fulton and All American Surface To Air Recovery (STAR) systems, used by the USA from the late 1940s to 1996. In training, the Fulton STAR system had several spectacular accidents. Its operational use by the CIA was also fraught with problems; but the Agency had notable successes with the system.

One mission to conduct a Fulton STAR exfiltration flew, unknowing, towards a waiting enemy that had compromised the agent. This is the story of the survivors of that mission.

Apart from a placeholder post to test the domain, the first post on WeaponsMan.com went live at 0005R (that’s five past midnight, Eastern Time) on 1 January 2012. Thus, today is our second anniversary — Our second birthday, if you will.

We’ve already covered our 2013 in Review. Here’s where we tell you what we’re doing in 2014, but first, let’s look back at that first, optimistic post, and see if a course correction is in order.

Here’s what we wrote:

Every Special Forces soldier is cross-trained in multiple disciplines. One of the most important is communications. These days, with modern satellite communications and locations systems, it’s rare for a team to be lost or out of touch with HQ, but for most of the history of Special Forces and special operations forces in general, it wasn’t unusual for a team to be both.

Your team might have made every mission tasking with flying colors, and brought everybody home safe, but if you didn’t make commo, you might as well have failed at everything. Your name was mud with the Colonel (generally called The Boss, unless he was disliked), the staff, and just about every

The only problem with it is: it’s not done.

This morning, we discovered that the statistics we were depending on were, to put it gently, all jacked up, and we’ve been working to repair them, whilst enjoying some New Year’s revelry. One beer, anyway.

So we expect that Weaponsman’s 2013 Year in Review will appear tomorrow, or some time in the first week of the New Year.

In which, we wish all of you all the best.

What’s the difference between a reporter in the state-controlled media in Red China and one in the New York Times of today? This headline from China has the answer:

Arrested reporter admits to taking bribes for false stories

via Arrested reporter admits to taking bribes for false stories – SPECIAL COVERAGE – Globaltimes.cn.

The Chinese reporter admits it.

That is all.

Representative photo of the perpetrator (likeness based on description)

Things you just couldn’t make up.

The Charleston County Sheriff’s office says in a report that deputies found a man covered with blood when they arrived at Helen Williams’ North Charleston home early Wednesday. She told investigators the man fell and cut himself, but couldn’t explain why her hands and clothes were also bloody.

Deputies say the man said Williams was so angry when he returned without beer because stores were closed on Christmas Eve that she grabbed a ceramic squirrel, beat him in the head, then stabbed him in the shoulder and chest.

via Police: No beer led to ceramic squirrel stabbing – DC News FOX 5 DC WTTG.

Smile for the mugshot, jailbird.

Sharzad Mir Gholikhan, a convicted felon and sometime Iranian government agent, has threatened us (from Iran, apparently, and from an electronic address associated with an Iranian government propaganda agency), for calling her a weapons trafficker. Her picture is to the right; we believe this is a passport photo from State Department files. Here’s what she says:

Shahrzad Mirgholikhan
[email on file -- claims an Iranian official status]
[IP on file --  from the  91.133.128.0 - 91.133.191.255 block historically associated with Iranian terrorist and government agency use].
Submitted on 2013/12/23 at 15:32 | In reply to [a WeaponsMan commenter].
How dare you are to use my name and give me the title of weapon trafficer! Remove my name from your False News otherwise I will take legal actions. SHAHRZAD MIRGHOLIKHAN