Weapons Man

Rescue for diplomats in Benghazi? — too costly to try.

A pile of kerbstones — yeah, let’s drop a million on that.

This is the “public art” that State rushed to buy lest the funds expire at the end of the fiscal year (9/30). As Iran and North Korea are building nukes, China is rattling sabres and threatening its Asian neighbors, and several South American nations collapse into dictatorship, this was the single highest priority of our nation’s diplomatic service:

This is the completed no-bid solicitation for the million-dollar rockpile:

As you see, the million was rushed ou

Many, perhaps most, of the people whose names and histories will appear on today’s obituary page were not born 72 years ago when the point Billy Mitchell had been trying to make in 1923 finally got through the thick skulls of the admirals of the United States Navy. That’s how long ago it was.

The entire nation was caught napping (and continued to be caught napping time and again for several weeks of disorienting defeats), but a whole nation can’t blame itself, and the President who was a latecomer to the cause of national defense wasn’t about to blame himself, so Kimmel and Short were made to walk the metaphorical plank. (The guys in the Phillipines, who did not have the excuse of surprise that the Hawaiian commanders had, And were caught hours later with their pants just as far down, weren’t similarly scapegoated).

A lot of the questions people ask about Pearl Harbor have long since been answered.

• Why did the Japs catch the Navy with its bell-bottoms down? Easy. Everybody knew that Japanese lead

So, you want a SAW. Maybe a Mk46.

Well, you could enlist with the Ranger Option… OK, OK, we hear ya. Most of the guys who read this can’t do that for one reason or another. Like they used up their NCAA combat arms eligibility. Or used up their body, already. Or are a bit on the old side for enlistment. Or are a bit on the anti-authority side. (In which case, consider SF). Or you are a citizen of another country — the globe holds a couple hundred of them, and every one has its charms, and a dedicated (and usually patriotic) gun nut or two.

Well, wouldn’t it be neat if there were a civilian-legal, semi-auto SAW you could buy in the USA as a Title 1 firearm? Well… there is. The guys at the US Machine Gun Armory (a private business, associated with the guys that bring you Small Arms Review and the Small Arms of the World website) reverse-engineered a Minimi about five years ago and by 2009 had ATF approval of a closed-bolt, hammer-fired, US-legal semi-auto SAW. In fact, the gun pictured at the

So, Q: For an appetizer course, do you use the dinner fork or the salad fork? A: Depends on which one is sticking in your brother’s chest. Oh, wait, that’s a steak knife.

Edward William Bright, 46, is accused of stabbing his brother repeatedly during the argument over which silverware to use for dinner at Bright’s home in Richland County, Columbia TV station WAGT reported.

The brother was stabbed in the torso with a steak knife, according to authorities.

via Cops: Man stabbed by brother over silverware | News – Home.

Now, if you were the sort of person who blames inanimate objects for crime, you’d be shocked and alarmed that steak knives are available in every kitchen in America, and are freely sold without even such common-sense measures as registration and licensing, one-steak-knife-a-month rules, or

Someone like Ralph Mariano, who’s realized that Sutton’s old saw about why he robbed banks — “That’s where the money is!” was painfully out of date. Nowadays, the banks are bustouts and the money is all in the mitts of the government.

But it turns out, the government is no more complaisant about being robbed than Sutton’s banks were:

Ralph M. Mariano, 55, pleaded guilty in May to conspiracy, theft of government property and tax evasion charges. He was a civilian employee of the Navy for 29 years, and had risen to be a chief engineer for the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport. He is one of six people to plead guilty in the case, and the only government employee to do so.

via Mastermind of $18M Navy kickbacks gets 10 years – U.S. – Stripes.

The USG was looted of about $18 million dollars, of which

Bob Bateman, terminal LTC, apparently doing war tourism in Iraq. Shiny new ACUs! Never been dirty. Quite the infantryman. Just ask him.

By now, if you are not living under a rock, you have heard about the intemperate (to say the least) and frankly stupid political article in an Esquire blog by one LTC Robert Bateman.

In it, Bateman calls for all kinds of gun bans, and fantasizes (there is no other word) about them being enforced at bayonet point by a politicized Army. “We will pry your gun from your cold, dead, fingers,” he writes. You can almost hear him fapping to the thought of it.

Good luck with that, Bob.

Rather predictably,

Posted for the entertainment of the jumpers among you.

“It is better that they do it, however imperfectly, than you do it for them.” — T.E. Lawrence.

Mute the audio, because the music some idjit dubbed in is really dreadful.

No, not the guy made famous by movies about street racing who apparently got quick-fried to a crackly crunch while (what else?) street racing. (If he writes anything now, it’s a neat trick). But one of the ATF street agents trapped in the senseless chaos of Phoenix Group VII, which deliberately ran guns to Mexican cartels, with the approval of the highest levels in the Department of Justice.

There are some new revelations in John Dodson’s book, The Unarmed Truth. For example, even the guns that weren’t bought for the cartels by the ATF were apparently bought by the FBI. At the time, Dodson and Olindo “Lee” Casa, among other field agents, had no idea how the investigation could possibly end well. From an excerpt in the New York Post:

‘It’s like the underwear gnomes,” my ATF colleague Lee Casa told me one time as we recounted the latest bizarre goings-on in Phoenix.

“What?” I asked.

“You ever watch ‘South Park’? The

Now, your local police department is probably not as bad as the Washington, DC police department. The DC department, which spends its days obstructing citizen firearms owners (or would-be owners) and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars pursuing charges of possession of an empty cartridge case, has one of the nation’s worst records for solving violent crimes. Their record is so bad you would be excused for wondering whether they’re just the nation’s most incompetent cops, or whether they’re not really trying.

DC Chief Cathy Lanier stumbles through her days from crisis to failure and back again, seeming to think that the definition of “leadership” is to give an anodyne and superficial voice clip to media, and then sit back and shuffle a few papers, redeploying more cops against suspected gun owners in the upper-class half of DC, while whistling past the chalk outlines and crime scene tapes in the criminal-class sectors. Until the next crisis hits.

The crisis that hit yesterday? A cop using the authority of his badge to shoot his very own teen and tween porn.  Breitbart.com:

RAF file photo of a Boston in Italy, March 1944.

David Kennedy Raikes was an accomplished poet, by age 20. That’s a good thing, as that’s all the time he got. Raikes was a Royal Air Force sergeant pilot of a Douglas Boston light bomber — the same plane the USAAF called the A-20 Havoc and was replacing at war’s end with the A-26 Invader. Bostons, or Havocs, were a staple of Lend-Lease and were operated not only by the USAAC/USAAF but also by Russia and Free France as well as by the RAF.

Raikes almost made it to the end of the war, but perhaps he had a premonition of his death. In a slim volume of his poetry published some nine years posthumously, the verse of the fallen airman evokes a spooky prescience:

And some did not come back. We never knew
Whether they lived – at first just overdue,
Till minutes changed to hours, and still

Sleeping-Ugly here is the villain of the piece: a brown tree snake. (From our February post).

Back in February, we wrote the story of the latest invasion and counter-invasion of the Pacific island of Guam, the scene of bloody fighting between the US and Japan twice in World War II. This invasion is by a menace even more adaptable and cunning than the Imperial Japanese Navy Special Landing Force: the brown tree snake. The counterattack: dead mice laced with Tylenol, and dropped from aircraft, with streamers to decelerate them and hang them up in the jungle canopy. The brown tree snake is a rare snake that will eat carrion, or at least, predeceased mice, and another biological oddity is its vulnerability to acetaminophen: 80 mg might be therapeutic for you, but it’s curtains for Mr. No-Shoulders. Guamanian TV station KUAM reports:

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The TSA are hopped-up bums accomplishing nothing useful. Security screening is empty security theater, and since 9/11 the TSA has never caught a terrorist or prevented a terrorist attack, while passengers have done it over and over again.

There are several reasons that the TSA doesn’t work. The general inefficiency of centralized government planning, versus decentralized individual decision-making, is one. The low intelligence, character and morals of TSA employees from top to bottom is another. No one good, decent, ethical, honest or moral has every been employed by TSA in any capacity whatsoever.

They are bums, thieves, child molesters, perverts and violent criminals, among other unpleasant things, but all of them bums, and we’re better off without them.

According to a convicted and imprisoned German cannibal (who has become vegetarian in protest against the unavailability of his favorite meat in the jug), there are 800 active practitioners of the “cannibal lifestyle” in Germany. Well, between the one who’s been locked up since 2001 and the one they just bagged, only 798 of them are still on the loose.

Germany’s Teutonically efficient Polizei didn’t have far to go to put the manacles on the latest accused, er, “humanitarian.” He was one of their own. ABC News:

Police on Wednesday found body parts on a property in the Ore Mountains, in the eastern German state of Saxony, that, according to German tabloid Bild, came from a murder carried out as part of a cannibal fetish act. The body parts are believed to belong to a 59-year-old man from Hanover, while the main suspect, who, according to Bild, owns the property on which the remains were found, is

The incredible exploding deal.

By now, most of the public knows the outline of the “deal” that a weak and desperate President Obama and Secretary Kerry reached with Iran’s ayatollahs.

• The US gets to say a deal was reached;
• The US and West lift sanctions on Iran (as does the UN, not that anyone but the West was complying with them;
• A few UN inspectors will get escorted to specific Iranian Potemkin research sites; and,
• Iran is free to continue its nuclear weapons development unhindered.

That was enough to make Neville Chamberlain look like freakin’ Otto von Bismarck compared to the gormless Americans. Netanyahu knows now how Beneš felt. But it turns out, the bad deal was even worse than that.

You have to go to the Times of Israel for the story<

Scene of the explosion. Investigators were never able to determine a probable cause.

We covered the trial of Craig Sanborn, accused of manslaughter by negligence after his black-powder-substitute plant blew up. The jury hit him with a conviction on all charges; last week it was the judge’s turn, and Sanborn drew a stiff sentence of 10-20 years.

Two of his factory workers, Don Kendall and Jesse Kennett, were killed in the blast and fire, and another was seriously injured. Investigators from multiple agencies were unable to determine the exact cause of the blast, but found evidence of bypassed safety standards and negligent operation.

It did’t help Sanborn’s defense that after the blast, but before the trial, the firm and Sanborn were fined $1.2 million by OSHA for safety violations.

NHPR quoted  U.S. ­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Assistan

Vancouver, BC, Canada has demanded that all new residential construction have Euro-style door levers instead of doorknobs. Why? Because they can, and some knob Nazi in city government prefers it.

In Germany in the 1980s, one GI locution for home was: “The Land of the Round Doorknobs.” The high water mark of the actual general-purpose Nazis has been left behind, leaving small and pungent artifacts of Nazi specificity dotted like tidal pools in the mudflats of modern Europe. Having lived in a knobbenrein society for years on end, we have a view on this.  Levers have their positive points, to be sure: you can teach yourself to open the door with your fourth point of contact, if you approach it with both hands full (and it happens to open in the right direction, which limits the practical utility of butt-opening, at least until we evolve opposable cheeks). And they’ll be ready for when you’re 80 and your hands don’t work (if the Death Panels haven’t sent you to the knacker’s,

This isn’t the usual “When Guns are Outlawed” tale of some Darwin Award death or heinous crime. Instead, it’s one video look at the futility of gun bans. There is probably no place on earth where weapons are much more excluded than they are in American airline airports. But as we’ve noted in other contexts, just because you have a Nazi approach to civil liberties doesn’t mean you can make the trains run on time. Here’s one of a delightful array of noise (and potentially widow-) makers you can assemble with “common household items” — as found in the secure area of airports.

After the shot, the gun is reloadable and ready to go, although the “cartridge” is shredded.

This interwar Vickers Mark VI tank, an extremely rare survivor of a British commercial model used by many nations, is likely to be auctioned. To its left (right in the pic) and behind it (left in the pic) are equally rare Panzer I and IV tanks from Germany. Image: MVTF.

The largest private collection of tanks and armored vehicles in the world is being broken up. It’s being transferred from the current foundation managing it, the Military Vehicle TEchnology Foundation, to the Collings Foundation, well known through its living-history displays of World War II and later aircraft. Collings plans to cherry-pick the best and most historic 1/3 of the vehicles and dump the rest in an August, 2014 auction.

If, as planned, the 160 unwanted vehicles raise $10 million, Collings will build a museum to house the 80 survivors.

If you were paying attention during our recent series on the Army’s Squad Automatic Weapon program of the 1970s, you’ll be able to tell what’s wrong with this guy’s gun, or at least, with the caption to it. The caption says: “XM248 Squad Automatic Weapon will be evaluated with other contenders in 1979.” And here’s the picture. Despite its graininess, the error is clearly visible. Can you spot it?

The error is this: that’s not an XM248 the grinning soldier is holding. If you remember our series, the principal changes from the XM235 included the relocation of the pistol grip aft from its original position on the longitudinal center of gravity, and to the right of the belt-box feed, which is also on the longitudinal center of gravity, but offset to the left. The Army didn’t like this asymmetric arrangement because it locked the approximately 10% of soldiers who are left-handed out of SAW positions (or required the to fire off the weak shoulder, at least).

Words fail.

PLAISTOW — A $1,000 reward is being offered after a family’s dog was shot and killed last week.

Local business owner Aminda Daviduk of Dunkin’ Donuts contributed $500 toward the reward for any information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible for the shooting of Jaycee, a nearly 9-year-old shepherd mix.

Another $500 was raised through donations made after a Facebook page called “Justice for Jaycee” was created by family friend Elayne Reynolds Tulliani.

Additional donations will be used to cover Jaycee’s X-ray costs and cremation following the shooting on Nov. 19 outside the family’s business, USA 1 Motors.

The family said the dog was let outside and went behind the business at 39 Westville Road where she was shot less than 20 feet from the building.

via $1,000 reward offered to learn who shot and killed Plaistow dog | New Hampshire Crime.

When the dog didn’t come back, Curto and his