Weapons Man

The last minute blitz is underway. (That, and we’re waiting on Amazon for some packages).

May God have mercy on our souls….

It’s kind of hard to pigeonhole this Western TV series. Produced by Henry Winkler (yeah, the Fonz), it’s a cross between a traditional Western and a Twilight Zone supernatural series (we’ll get to why anon). Taped in Canada on a tiny budget, and presented on Showtime in two seasons in the late 90s, Dead Man’s Gun is a classic TV outing with very distinct good guys, very distinct bad guys, very predictable plots, and “surprises” you will see coming even if you’re Helen freakin’ Keller. (And she’s dead). It has occasional moments of charm, but they flit away and the leaden didacticism of the show weighs down on you. 

The titular gun is a beautiful, engraved and inlaid, break-action Smith & Wesson Schofield, an unusual choice even though it was a popular gun in its day. (Don’t be misled by the cap-and-ball Colt on the DVD cover. Just Hollywood bozosity). T

Rather a lot. We mentioned that the Navy had restricted its pilots to 11 hours a month some time ago. Turns out, according to a Julian Barnes report in the WSJ (if you’re paywalled out, this Google search will get you in), the Air Force is flying even less: a max of 120 hours a year, or 10 a month. The cuts hit junior pilots the hardest:

The training cutbacks have fallen heaviest on younger, more inexperienced pilots. Experienced pilots resumed flying first because they have responsibility for training junior officers. As a result, it takes longer for young pilots to move from wingman to flight lead to instructor pilot, according to the Air Force.

“You know the game chutes and ladders? What we are finding right now is the chutes are longer than the ladders,” said Lt. Col Brian Stahl, a F-16 pilot. “We need to

This is a rather well-done short, student film set in a South African military unit during the apartheid state’s border war with the South West Africa People’s Organization, the SWAPO that ultimately became the present-day rules of Namibia (formerly South West Africa, formerly German SWA to 1918).

The film has some conventional ideas about South African whites, English- and Afrikaans-speaking. The hero is the guy who refuses to fight, refuses to submit to the brutal drill corporal. It’s anti-military as much as it is anti-war, but we offer it to you because. as we said, it is well done.

The fellow that posted it has some on-point comments about accuracy

To le Roux’s comments, we’d only add that we’re pretty sure the kevlar style helmets postdate, in SA service, the apartheid state. The depiction of military training is a civilian’s and an example of how movies feed on themselves. Other than that uniforms and weapons seem close to accurate.

Getting, thanks to an old friend now in industry, the inside scoop on a very interesting deal — and being sworn to secrecy. Maybe at SHOT. Maybe later. Sorry. (Now we’ve shared our anticistrangulation with you. Heh).

Gun homicides in 2010: 11,078 (CDC). Note that a percentage of these (somewhere between 1/5 and 1/3) are justifiable homicides and accidents that incur charges of negligent homicide, but CDC is too highly politicized to break those out.

Fatal prescription-opioid poisonings in 2010: 16,000 (story does not cite original source).

What the two stats have in common: most murder victims, and most opiate ODs, have made life choices that put them at very high risk of premature death. Sad, really. So much human potential gone to waste.

The New York Post reminds us that, while the .gov seems to leak everything else, they’re still hanging on grimly to a report on indicators of official hel

Just because these ads are old, doesn’t mean any one of them is a bad idea. The British, whose chains rest lightly on their shoulders, don’t get it; an excited Chris Pleasance in the Daily Mail seems Shocked!, Shocked! that we barbarians in the Colonies once gave guns as Christmas gifts, but reassures him/her/it-self that the ads are “outdated.”

Hmm. These ads do date from the 1950s and 1960s, but nobody better tell Chris that more guns are being given and received under this year’s Christmas tree than were when the ads ran. And kids will still look like this happy guy when they open the long rectangular package:

Once, a kid reacted much like that to find his first .22 — a Winchester, as it happens — under the tree. His Dad bought it for him, despite Dad not caring much for guns; because it was what the kid wanted. He was an incipient WeaponsMa

Remember this? If you’re Canadian and old, maybe. It was replaced by the Maple Leaf in 1965.

Brian Wang had a brief and link-rich post at Next Big Future a couple of days ago, on a subject we’ve discussed before: Canada’s deliberate retrograde from a first-class first-world Army, Navy and Air Force to a small, professional European-style tripwire/peacekeeper force.  He hangs the onus on former PM John Diefenbaker:

Diefenbaker of Canada agreed to stop making major weapons in 1959 and wound down Canada’s military from 5% of GDP to about 2% of GDP over 6 years

We&#

In Edward C. Ezell’s magisterial Handguns of the World, there’s a chapter (Chapter 18) on the production of military handguns to 1945. It’s the merest taste that whets one’s appetite for more information, but it shows some of the methods used to produce military pistols and revolvers of the early 20th Century. A picture shows a horizontal milling machine with a complex cutter that does the entire lower and front section of a Colt double-action revolver receiver; another shows a series of Browning Model 1900 pistol frames showing eight major operations, beginning with a raw forging. An ingenious Pratt & Whitney machine that uses two spindles to do a rough and finish cut in a single set-up is shown, as are specialty rifling machines as used at Colt and FN.

If you’re a gun-manufacture addict, this chapter is purest amphetamine. But like its metaphorical equivalent, the effect quickly wears off (it is only a tiny slice, from pp. 654-677 of the massive book) and you just wish there would be more.

Not many people say that, unless they’re in Hollywood movies, or committing suicide-by-cop. But Robert Kaiser of the PPSS Group displays full confidence in his body armor here:

It looks like the (roughly 3.5 lb / 1/4″ thick) body armor held up to the Glock alright, but transmitted considerable energy to Kaiser, enough to be momentarily disabling. He does recover fairly quickly. He’s shot at 1:16, and initially doubles over; but he’s standing erect again as the nurse or assistant removes the armor at 1:30.

“It hurts a lot… would I suffer for a couple days, of severe bruising? And the answer’s yes.” The video shows you realistically what you can and can’t expect from concealable body armor.

Human confidence-demonstrations of body armor are scarcely new. The late Richard Davis of the defunct Second Chance company was an exponent of them. Here, he shoots associate Alex Jason with an FN-FAL at point blank range. Of course, the vest Jason is wearing is the Hardcore III, something rated for rifle-caliber hits. “There’s no vest that is totally bulletproof. On the other hand, there’s no bullet that can

“George” is George Zimmerman, the only man in Florida who can’t drive down the street without a small army of media stringers tailing him, like papparazzi staking out beach houses in Malibu. They made him famous, they hate his guts, now their bile must be doubly curdled by the discovery that they’re making him rich. 

George painted the picture. He would like to sell the picture. A lot of people would like to buy the picture — both because it’s kind of attractive, because the sentiment “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all,” still resonates with some members of the public, and because there’s a lot of people who would like to do what they could to curdle some newsmen’s bile, after all.

And they’ve bid George’s painting up to over $100,000 on eBay. Here’s the link, in case you want it more than that. In the listing, George says:

This constitutes an “arsenal”? Are you kidding, CBS?

How big is an “arsenal”? The term historically denotes a facility for the industrial-scale production and storage of weapons of war, and carries even in figurative use a strong connotation of “a great quantity of guns and ammunition”. Merriam-Webster says the term dates to Italy in the 16th Century, arsenale, from an even earlier Arabic expression, dar sina, “place of manufacture.” M-W defines the modern English word as follows:

1 a : an establishment for the manufacture or storage of arms and military equipment
1 b : a collection of weapons
2 : store, repertoire “the team’s arsenal of veteran players.”

Increasingly, though, the media has been redefining “arsen

We’re pretty hard on the media around here, and by and large they have it coming. But every once in a while we run across a story that is so well investigated and well reported that we’re embarrassed that we ever tarred all reporters with the same brush.

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel has been peeling back the onion of fail surrounding a local (to them) ATF sting. It was a classic storefront operation, in which the ATF, suspecting people somewhere are inclined to deal in contraband, sets up a storefront (“Fearless Distributing”) to enable them to commit those felonies that were clearly lacking only a place — a wired-for-sound, monitored-round-the-clock kind of place — to eventuate. According to John Dodson, this is a standard, even canned, ATF tactic. But the Milwaukee sting went terribly wrong.

The abuses were so broad and deep that they defy synoptic characterization, but the ATF among other things lost several of their own weapons, including a full-auto M4 which remains in criminal hands, somewhere; they let guns walk; they enlisted

This is not a cradle. Apparently some people have to be told, like Maria Oliva Guaman-Guaman..

That’s where the woman threw her newborn to die. Hey, she was a downtrodden, undocumented non-worker, previously deported; it’s not culturally sensitive to expect her to conform to bourgeois worker-bee anglo-saxon norms, like not killing one’s children. This is just the kind of person the Lower Hudson News holds up as a model to us all: a criminalien. Instead, they’re alarmed about the real hazards: gun owners. Meanwhile, the New York Daily News has the story about the heartless mother:

Cops in Rockland County have arrested a cold-hearted mom who they say killed her baby boy and tossed him in the trash.

Maria Oliva Guaman-Guaman, 23, was arraigned Tuesday night on a charge of second-degree murde

“It’s not what you don’t know, it’s what you know that ain’t so.”  – Will Rogers.

These are claimed to be among approximately 2,000 guns surrendered in a recent “buyback” in Los Angeles. LA has a history of multi-thousand “buybacks.”

Will Rogers would probably be bemused at the phenomenon of the “gun buyback.” In this latest manifestation of the ancient human capacity for self-delusion made immortal by the Dutch mass tulip-bulb hysteria, men of presumed good will pile up unwanted guns into a knob, hill, mountain or whatever terrain feature they can manage, and consign them to the fires of Perdition. Come to think of it, a better metaphor may be the Salem Village witch trials of 1692, except, in this case, burning the broomsticks rather than the witches. (Of course, no witches were burnt at Salem — that was a European sport — but the meme has taken ho

WKMG 6 in Orlando reports that the Sunshine State is the Gunshine State this year, with nearly a million background checks likely on sales of guns from dealers to private parties. Some of these, of course, are resales of used guns (it’s a rare gun that wears out before its owner does). The Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which tracks the instant background checks, saw record levels of activity on Black Friday — and now, last year’s record of 797,000 checks has fallen by December 15, with over a week of Christmas shopping still to go.

As the graph shows, the rate of increase seems to have leveled off. However, part of that is the truncation of December for 2013. If we extrapolate that the rest of sales in December matches the first fifteen days’ sales, we see the rate of increase still has leveled off, but not as dramatically as the graph of known numbers:

We don’t have a photo from this particular mishap. This one is from another fatal boat accident, on another lake in NH, that also is likely to produce criminal charges.

A human being is a thin-skinned, fragile organism entirely lacking the robustness of big game, and easily killed with almost anything. Politicians and media focus on gun accidents but ignore other mishaps.  Recreational boating, for example, produced 4.515 accidents and 651 deaths in US waters in 2012, according to the US Coast Guard (statistics .pdf). Sometimes, an accident is raised by negligence to the level of a crime, like in this New Hampshire case.

A Rockingham County grand jury handed up an indictment against Lawrence A. Buswell, Jr., 53, of 11 Lions Way, during its December s

Two quiet, intelligent, methodical, and self-educated sons of an obscure churchman launched into the sky a spindly wood-and-fabric contraption which fulfilled a dream nurtured in the bosom of man since he arose in unlettered antiquity.

They planned, they experimented, they built — they flew. The initial Wright Flyer combined an internal combustion engine, a Pratt truss for structural rigidity (this contribution came via Octave Chanute), and airfoils developed by the brothers themselves in a rudimentary wind tunnel.

December 17, 1903 was the day men evolved from groundlings watching the birds to fellow avians soaring with them. If you had asked Aristotle, Avogadro, Agustus Caesar, Isaac Newton, Louis Napoleon, the Apostle Peter, or Peter the Great, they’d have told you that man would never fly, and the common people would have echoed that bleak prognostication. It was laughable, ridiculous, irrational, and above all, impossible.

But after December 17, 1903, it would never be impossible again.

World of Firepower: the magazine for those who liked Recoil but don’t like gun bans and the publishers who support them.

A publisher which gives buckets of money to anti-gun politicians and causes is Source Interlink Media, and they took their anti-gun ‘tude to a new level by publishing an anti-gun gun magazine. The mag, Recoil, was aimed at casual store browsers and combined the Magazine-for-the-ADHD-patient style and Jack-the-Lad tone of Maxim, with gun content generated by a bunch of gun newbies from SIM’s stable of car-brand tuner magazines.

With that volatile mix of ignorance and access, it was only a matter of time until a Recoil editor stepped on his reproductive tackle whilst wearing mountaineering crampons. The editor in question was at first defended by his anti-gun b

Another South Central LA criminal is dead of gun violence and combustion dynamics, but mostly combustion dynamics. One Richard Glover blew himself to Kingdom Come in a spectacular fuel-air explosion, while trying to steal commercial quantities of gasoline. Some people have to learn things the hard way.

And for some people, even that isn’t enough. It was Glover’s second time burning himself stealing gas. It was just his first time he made it all the way to a happy ending.

LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — A man was killed Tuesday while trying to siphon gas from a 76 station in South Los Angeles.

The Los Angeles Police Department received a call around 6:30 a.m. about a burned body in the 4440 block of Avalon Boulevard.

When officers arrived, they found the victim, identified by family members as Richard Glover, inside a charred-out van.

Authorities believe he was trying to steal gas from an underground tank when the vehicle exploded.

“I

The VA did this a couple thousand times, experimenting on troubled vets in the 1950s and 60s. They think.

Here’s a story about some of that great medical care the VA gave WWII and Korean War veterans back in the 1950s, and then didn’t even bother to keep decent records of. 

http://projects.wsj.com/lobotomyfiles/?ch=one

The operations, which were done in the thousands, were prefrontal lobotomies, or as they call them in some documents, leukotomies, because the stainless-steel tool they used to destroy patients’ brains was called a leucotome.

We’re not sure we know the difference between leuko- and lobo- in this case, actually, but we’re not letting anyone from VA anywhere near our Brain Housing Group.

The funny thing is