Weapons Man

This M1A is a civilian-legal clone of the M14, a rifle whose development was deeper than it looks at a glance.

By the time we were on the ground and familiar enough with military weapons and the employment of same, the M14 Rifle was long obsolete. It persisted in some specialty uses: as the M21 Sniper System, an accurized National Match M14 with a ART II scope (or awkward PVS-2 image-intensifying night sight) was our primary sniper arm, at least until the development of the M24 Sniper Weapons System. The M24 had the M21 beat on everything but second-shot capability: it was more accurate, more durable, more dependable, and lighter. But when all we had was the M21, we thought it was pretty good. Other than that, the M14 was used as a makeweight in training courses, and as a way to give opposing forces a dissimilar weapon in force-on-force training with blanks.

It was easy to develop some contempt

You don’t often see that sentiment expressed about a new TV show by the star of the show, but in a moment you’ll see Geoff Stults say that about his new military-themed show, Enlisted. We won’t be watching it here, becauase we’re not big TV people, but an interesting thing happened when the trailer for the new Fox TV comedy hit: actual soldiers tore it a new fourth point of contact.

Then an even more interesting thing happened: the producers put their principal actor on screen, admitting that, essentially, “we screwed up,” and offering a show challenge coin to anyone that catches them in a new “goof.” Here’s the mea culpa:

The show tells the story of three brothers who are in the Army, but not at war. The two younger brothers were left behind at the fictional “Fort McGee, FL” on the “rear detachment” when the unit deployed, and the older brother got sent back after lo

Before…

Hey, stoned, air-headed, and wobbling across the traffic lanes without a license is one way to go through life. Not a way we’d recommend, but there’s always that 5% that doesn’t get the word. Meet Darriean Hess, 2013 Miss Bad Driver for New Hampshire, and a contender for the national title. While the national media ties itself in knots over some asshat’s crime with a shotgun in a Colorado school, here on the Atlantic seaboard this PAR-tay animal outkilled him two-to-one, and put two others in the hospital with life-changing injuries. Outside of the local media, and a few brief blurbs in Boston media (the victims were all Massachusetts residents participating in a charity bicycle race), nobody cares about Darriean Hess, although she’s wishing she hadn’t done it, or at least did it in Massachusetts where the prison doors don’t clang shut for such long stretches of time:

HAMP

Some people are up in arms that the military is transferring hundreds, maybe thousands, of enormous Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected vehicles to local cops and sheriff’s offices.

Wait till you hear what happens to the ones the cops are not taking.

BAGRAM, Afghanistan — Faced with an epidemic of deadly roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. military officials ordered up a fleet of V-hulled 16-ton armored behemoths in 2007 to help protect American soldiers and Marines.

At a cost of $1 million each, the ugly tan beasts known as MRAPS have saved countless lives and absorbed or deflected thousands of insurgent bomb blasts in teeming cities, desert flats and rutted mountain roadways. The lumbering vehicles are so beloved that soldiers have scrawled notes of thanks on their armor.

Er… call us doubtful about 

Of course, from the point of view of the Taliban, nobody knew anyone was counting down. It was just thwack! out of the blue, and their commander was instantly among 72 virgins, clean young boys, or, possibly, goats. (Hey, we’re non-judgmental about Taliban lifestyle choices around here).

His fellow Talibs didn’t know what or who killed him, or why. But his death was an instant, undeniable, and demoralizing fact.

The men who knew the answers were lying prone a mile and three-quarters away. They were Australian snipers from D Coy 2 Cdo, and they’d just shot him with a Barrett .50 caliber sniper rifle. Chris Masters in the Telegraph (AU):

Two marksmen using Barrett M82A1 50 calibre rifles simultaneously fired. The bullets were six seconds in the air. One killed the Taliban commander. It is not known for certain which sniper fired the fatal shot.

That’s why we weren’t up most of today. Doing analog stuff, at least until rained out; then cooking a monster dinner and sleeping it off!

This post is backdated to this morning for consistency’s sake, but posted at nearly 11 PM. We still owe the TW3s for the last two weeks. We felt, under the circumstances, ’twas more important to get the Saturday Matinees up.

This week, we’re going to make some SHOT Show predictions (#1: WeaponsMan.com is not going to be attending. Sorry about that, plans changed).

This 1980s miniseries is a marathon of a soap opera, based on three staggeringly successful novels by historical novelist John Jakes, that uses two fictional families and their intertwined fates to tell the story of the American Civil War. The boxed DVD set comprises the three miniseries that begin when young men Orry Main and George Hazard head off to West Point in 1842. Main is a scion of a family of South Carolina planters; Hazard, of Philadelphia industrialists. A chance encounter and the hardships of plebe year bind them together in lifelong friendship. The nation’s coming reckoning with the institution of slavery tears them apart. An array of subplots and secondary characters played by a who’s who of acting talent keep things hopping for generations of Mains and Hazards for a span of some fifty years.  

If there are faults with North & South they are that the third miniseries, as we’ll see, falls far short of the bar set by the first two; and some of the characters

Every once in a while, one of these stories comes along that just defies synopsis. This is one of those stories, one which exists in the strange intersection of a dysfunctional family and an oversupply of -OH radicals in the bloodstream.

A Burien [Washington] man accused of biting off his father’s eyebrow after turning unruly on a drive home from a family wedding has been charged with assault.

King County prosecutors contend Joel Salmeron-Ciprian chomped on his father after the older man pulled over because of his son’s behavior. Salmeron-Ciprian, 30, has been charged with second-degree assault.

According to charging papers, Salmeron-Ciprian’s father was driving his inebriated son and other relatives home from a wedding at 7:45 p.m. on Dec. 1 when he was forced to stop the car.

King County deputy sheriffs arrived to find Salmeron-Ciprian pinned to the ground by his father, who was bleeding from the face. As it turned out, his right eyebrow was missing.

Salmeron-Ciprian fought with deputies, one of whom shocked him with a stun gun, according to chargin

If you’ve seen the Jean-Claude van Damme “epic split” video this will make more sense. If you haven’t, the Belgian brute’s feat, which was an ad for Volvo trucks, is after the jump.

The narration makes no sense to us, but that’s just us. Hit the “more” button to see the ad that Chuck and gang are sending up in this video Christmas card!

While Norris’s split was a CGI gag, Van Damme’s was reportedly the real thing.

Both of these guys have got to be in their sixties. We wouldn’t tangle with either.

Ler’s stop berating the media long enough to crown Leslie Linthicum of the Albuquerque Journal with laurels for her report on the injury, long (and still risky) recovery, and remarkable character of Bernallillo County Sheriff’s Office Deputy Robin Hopkins. Hopkins, the mother of a toddler, took an AK round in the worst and the best possible place.

It was the worst possible place because the steel-cored FMJ round came through her cruiser door and hit her well below the vest. It crashed into her hipjoint, destroying a section of the femur, and, even more alarming, both branches of the femoral artery and the single-branched femoral vein. The bullet lodged in her shattered thigh. But it was the best possible place because of where the wound occured in the physical world. As the criminal sped away to a rendezvous with other officers, and his own mortality, Hopkins’s bullet-riddled Charger coasted to a stop right in front of a fire/rescue station. When seconds count, sometimes the Lord (or blind luck, if you prefer) delivers succor in seconds. Firemen and cops got a tourniquet on — a lesson of GWOT war trauma experience — and rushed her to the hospital.

Here’s a small sample of Ms Li

Pull-ups? Never mind! C’mon down, girls.

But before you all celebrate, the way it was done is this: the Marines dropped the standard for the convenience of the majority of women, who could not meet it.

The old standard? Three pull-ups. The new? None. That’s because even with extra training, most Marine women couldn’t do three pull-ups by the end of recruit training. This was much lower than the requirement for men, but only 45% of women Marines could achieve this goal.

So, the USMC has erased the goalposts — quietly, without a press release to the outside world.

Meanwhile, 14 enlisted women entered Marine infantry training. Ten of them failed, three passed. The Marines’ propaganda machine described four as passing, for example in this video report, but was forced to admit that one of the four passed, except for ”the comba

Actually, this is the third time that we’ve written one of these up. This is not surprising as far more people are killed annually with things like “baseball bats” than they are with things like “assault rifles.”

Miami’s New Times, who never met a criminal they didn’t like more than his victim, starts off saying some nice things about the young perp (right) before saying what he did.

Brandon Aydelott loved baseball. He was a varsity player at Gulf Breeze High School who also played in the Golden Gloves competition circuit, which regularly saw scouts from Division 1 schools. The 17-year-old senior could throw a 99 mph fastball — although he averaged about 80 — and also played shortstop. Police say a baseball bat played a part in the murder.

Endangered species: EA-18G Growler. This one embiggens big indeed (US Navy Photo)

In an era of extreme defense retrenchment, there are basically three things you can do, as a company highly dependent on defense contracts:

1. You can hope for the budget climate to turn around, while funding your own existence, at least, until the money runs out. This is what Evergreen Air Cargo tried to do; they lost.
2. You can try to diversify from government-contract to commercial-contract business. This is too much of a cultural leap for companies addicted to the crack of cost-plus government contracts (we’re lookin’ at you, Booz-Allen) to do. If your company is already running both government and commercial operations, you might not be able to use all your .gov capacity on the .com side, which means wrenching cuts and layoffs. To try to shift your doomed military contract business toward

So we had a slate of posts for today all queued up, but some genius (ahem) didn’t hit the “Publish” button. We figured it out when no one commented on our awesome 0600 AK reliability post. We just put it up about 18 hours late, and we’re going to leave things at that through 1100 Friday.

Your WeaponsMan.Com dues for Boxing Day will be refunded ;)

Back to normal (?) after that 1100 post. Thanks for reading and for commenting!

The Avtomat Kalashnikova obrazets 1974g and its successors have an enviable reputation for reliability, especially under adverse conditions. There are a number of reasons for this, and we’ll go into them in some depth here. First, though, let’s say what is not a cause:

• It’s not because of blind luck.
• It’s not because the weapon is orders of magnitude better than its worldwide competitors. Indeed, by the end of WWII a very high standard of reliability had come to be expected, and weapons that did not meet this standard were mercilessly eliminated, like the Johnson M1941 and the Tokarev SVT.
• It’s not because Kalashnikov the man had genius that was lacking in other men. His competitors in the field, from Browning, to the Mauser-werke engineers of the 1

Something quite remarkable happened. For the first time, men were in position to see the Earth rise over another heavenly body, on the Apollo 8 circumlunar mission. This video from the Goddard Space Flight Center shows how the three astronauts teamed up to take an iconic photograph.

This happened off the air, at least as far as the public is concerned. The audio in that video came from the spacecraft voice recorder.

The broadcast that evening, the one that those of us who were alive at th

We learn through a chyron crawl that Mikhail Kalashnikov has passed away at age 94. He is most famous, of course, for the Avtomat Kalashkikova, the most-produced and most-copied automatic weapon in world history.

We’re sure that both the gun culture and the anti-gun culture will have competing obituaries shortly. He led a long and interesting life, serving in the Red Army (reportedly as a tanker, not a rifleman) and began to work in gun design whilst recuperating from combat wounds.

The AK became a legend while Kalashnikov still lived, primarily because of its simple manual-of-arms and legendary reliability. It could be built by unlettered blacksmiths with hand tools, maintained by a policy of absolute neglect, and its operation and field-stripping could be grasped by illiterate peasants — still a presence in the Soviet Army of the 1950s and 60s — in minutes. Despite that, it was accurate enough for close combat, effective enough at combat ranges, light enough  to be carried at the ready for days on end, and compact enough to fit through the narrow hatches of aircraft and combat vehicles.

The AK adorns the insignia of many terrorist groups and one nation (not coincidentally, one ruled by former terrorists). It is one of the default images in every TV news producer’s prewri

How many?

Russell Goldman of ABC News is one of the small army of reporters who maintain cast iron, 24/7 coverage on the doings of America’s only “white hispanic” (media term for a Spanish guy they don’t like!) painter. Goldman and his effete cohort of soi-disant newsmen have been unable to find anything to write about in Benghazi, the ATF’s ongoing and widespread gunwalking, the new war in Sudan (which has already had its first US casualties, a handful of wounded Marines), or the cancellation of millions of insurance policies.

Because they’re as obsessed by Zimmerman as they are by various Kardashians. (Does anybody who does not write for a news outlet give a rat’s rump about those people?) Zimmerman is their Great White Hispanic

A lot of things you might do could send you to jail. Like bringing a gun to an airport checkpoint. However, if you’re a local politician? The fix is in:

No charges will be filed against a Montrose city councilwoman who said she forgot her handgun was inside her purse when she brought it through security last month at Montrose County Regional Airport, while the councilwoman has agreed to participate in adult diversion, Mesa County District Attorney Pete Hautzinger said Friday.

via No charges in official’s gun-at-airport incident | GJSentinel.com.

Or, you could leave your gun in your unlocked car, and criminals could sell it on the street. But if you’re a cop, not only will nothing happen to you, some bright spark at the local paper will write the story under the headline that

There’s a very large oeuvre of survivalist fiction. There are entertaining popular bestsellers like Robert Merle’s 1972 Malevil, Matt Bracken’s Enemies Foreign and Domestic trilogy, and James Wesley, Rawles’s current Survivors series. There are explictly gun-culture-oriented works like John Ross’s Unintended Consequences. There are inexpensive Kindle-published or self-published works, which range from “as good as those bestsellers” to “we see why it’s self-published” and every station in between.

There’s the nuclear-apocalypse genre, the zombie-apocalypse genre, the terrible-disease- and supernatural-apocalypse genres (rolled into one in Stephen King’s excellent The Stand) and the bankers-finally-totally-crater-the-econ