Weapons Man

There is much discussion nowadays about the Insider Threat. While the IED threat is at practically unimaginable levels today, the biggest single killer of USSF and other elements that work closely with Afghan National Army or other security forces is “bad seeds” in those forces. The suits-and-stars levels of the defense establishment have been trying their best to pretend this hasn’t happened, so they can focus on their prime objectives, like beancount “diversity” and social-engineering games. To the extent that the rampant insider threat is acknowledged, it is treated as if it were an entirely new thing. This is the best you can expect from an Army with a weak institutional memory, ADHD-like assignment policy, and resolute fixation upon the present.  Welcome to Baby Duck World, where all things are novel and unprecedented.

Last year, we covered the interesting Arsenal AF2011 Second Century pistol — essentially, two 1911s Siamesed together into one double-barrel, double-mag, doubly-outrageous gun. It was one of those things we half expected to begin and end with a SHOT Show splash, but an Arsenal release last month says the seemingly-made-for-Hollywood hand cannon is headed for, if not the big screen, the local gun store.

We doubted but we were wrong. And we rejoice in our wrongnitude. We’ll show you some final-assembly images from Arsenal, after Arsenal’s release:

ARSENAL FIREARMS BEGINS WORLDWIDE DELIVERIES

NOVEMBER 18, 2013 08:46 – NEWS
Arsenal Firearms is proud to announce the global deliveries of all its product lines, effective November the 1st, 2013.

Products such as the AF2011-A1 Second Century double barrel pistol, the Strike One and the Legend bolt action rifles started rolling our the Italian manufacturing faci

So here it is, 12 hours behind schedule. And we didn’t get the Matinee or TW3 up yet, either (although we’re grinding on both).

On the plus side, we did get some things done. We went to the range and continued our battle with the Glock. The Glock remains miles ahead, but we will beat it or die trying. Still don’t have a good supply of 9mm ball so we emptied out the weeks-old warshots in the mags. It was 100% reliable (that’s typical, innit?) which is more than we can say for one of the backups we also function-fired. The PPK worked perfectly, as it has done since its birth in 1930-something, but the Bauer .25 didn’t feed from a full mag. Glad to find that out here at the range and not in a social situation with the Glock and Walther both locked back.

Kid, meanwhile, took the long gun equivalent of Glock, a Chinese folding stock AK, and blasted away. When he was tired of groups resembling a cylinder-bore shotgun at 100m, he allowed as how he might be open to some marksmanship pointers. We worked him through the 8 Steady Hold factors and he began shooting his zombie rat and zombie hog targets in the eye.

He discovered that, while any kind of shooting is fun, accurate shooting is way more fun, and now he thinks maybe old guys actually are useful for something b

We looked at the earlier (1971) Colditz: Escape of the Birdmen movie a few weeks ago; this is another in the long line of jailbreak-from-Nazis-films that began with the Colditz Story in 1955. This version is a two-part, three-hours-total miniseries from fifty years after the original, with no digging tunnels, no building gliders, no masses of Americans who weren’t in the real OFLAG IVc, but some fairly realistic escape scenes and methods, using the sort of escapes that the Colditz escapees — the few who made a “home run” and the many who were recaptured — actually used. Some, in fact, are exact analogues of real escaps, although they’re used in the service of a dramatic plot with rather more twists and turns than the mundane lives of real prisoners actually had.

One of the best features is the portrayal of MI-9, the clandestine assistance o

Devil cat? Well, maybe there’s some kitty crazy in the eyes….

Shiny the cat looks innocent enough, but in England, where guns are really outlawed, this mild-looking moggy has been holding a whole village hostage.

A pet cat has been accused of launching a series of attacks across a village and putting residents and pets in hospital.

The black tom called Shiny has been nicknamed the ”Devil Cat” after being reported to the police fives times over its violent behaviour.

Locals say Shiny chases children, picks fights with dogs and even bursts into people’s homes to claw and scratch them.

Its victims say they are so scared they retreat behind locked doors and arm themselves with hoses and mugs of hot tea whenever they see the black cat prowling the streets.

Despite being reported to the police officers are powerless to act b

“WeaponsMan,” we can hear you thinking. “Dey already done dat.” Well, not exactly. Sure, they printed a gun before, but this time they did something pretty amazing: they printed all 34 non-spring parts in a single go (see the photo of the parts below, fresh from the laser-sintering machine with only the unused powder removed yet). And they printed it of Inconel 625, which you’ve probably never used in a gun before (but if you’ve ever flown in a jet airplane, it was probably the turbofan engine’s hot-section shaft and several other critical parts.

Inconel is fairly expensive and is normally not used in firearms for three reasons: (1) cost, (2) lack of necessity (steel, aluminum, and stainless steel have gotten the job done for the last century), and, (3) until now, it’s been fairly difficult to work with.

Indeed, one of the greatest applications for Direct Metal Laser Sintering (and SLS and other metal-sin

Geissele Automatics, best known for their excellent AR triggers, is offering a few Black Friday Deals. The one that caught our eye was on the Reaction Rod and some other tools. .

We like tools, and we’ve mentioned before how much we like the Reaction Rod. For $110 plus shipping, Geissele sells you the Reaction Rod and throws in a Trigger Fitting Pin (very useful for doing trigger work; the pin is the one with the knob on the end) and some gas block tools (the Roll Pin Tool is the one that resembles a pencil) specifically for the light, compact Geissele gas block.

Description: Armorer’s Package Includes:

- AR15/M4 Reaction Rod
- Fitting Pin
- Gas Block Roll Pin Tool
- Gas Block Punch List

via Armorer’s Package – AR15/ M4 Reaction Rod – Black Friday 2013.

(They have a similarly discounted Armorer’s Package for AR-10/SR

For Francesco Raccosta, the 13th was truly unlucky. Captured by rival mafiosi, the Italian mobster was beaten with iron bars and then — still alive — fed to pigs.

Francesco Raccosta was allegedly fed to the pigs, which are prized for their ability to dispose of most of a human body, as part of a bloody turf war between two clans belonging to the ‘Ndrangheta mafia of Calabria, in the far south of Italy.

[Gangster Simone Pepe] described the killing in chilling terms to a friend in a telephone conversation that was intercepted by police.

“It was satisfying to hear him scream…Mamma mia, how he squealed, but I couldn’t give a shit. Someone said a few bits of him remained at the end of it all, but I couldn’t see anything, for me nothing remained at all. I said, wow, how a pig can eat!”

via

There’s an art and a science to the lopping-off of heads… not to mention a tradition. A Kukri has its own nomenclature. From khukrimuseum.com

We covered this Nepalese soldier of the Queen’s plight back in August, and noted that he returned to duty in July, after initial media reports that he beheaded a prisoner were proven false.

Earlier news reports had the British commander of troops in Afghanistan, Richard Kemp, condemning the Gurkha private, and anonymous British staff officers calling him a war criminal.

[I]nvestigation showed that the headless Talib was a combat casualty, not a desecrated corpse…

So, for whatever reason, the attempt to throw the book at this young soldier got cut off at the… knees. The amazing, L

We wrote in one of our “when guns are outlawed” posts:

Here is a thought about guns. About 3.5 million guns are manufactured every year, and about 10 billion rounds of fixed small arms ammunition. The anti-gunners say 30,000 “gun deaths” occur annually (a figure they get to by lumping murders, justifiable homicides by police, ditto by citizens, and suicides — which alone are two thirds of “gun deaths” — into a single number). So less than 1% of one year’s production of guns is used in a “gun death”, and about 3 one-hundred-thousandths of a percent of one year’s civilian ammo production is used in a “gun death.” Change the denominator to homicides, and even using CDC’s padded number, the percentages drop to 0.31% and a vanishingly small 0.00011% — eleven hundred-thousandths of a percent. We’ll elaborate on this in a post in the next few days.

Freedom

Life and health

Friends and family

Turkeys. The farm-bred one that gave up its life for our lunch today, and the seven wild ones that walked across the backyard at about 0500 this morning, alike. Is it possible that even as Franklin was wrong about the eagle, he was right about the turkey?

Work to keep the mind engaged

…and all you guys and gals who drop in here.

What with the holiday, and a power outage, and this and that, it’s been slow lately. We have not forgotten you; indeed, we’re keenly aware that we’re neglecting you.

With internal polling showing her recall a certainty, Colorado’s embattled anti-gun extremist Evie Hudak resigned to keep the seat in the Democrats’ corner. With an open seat, her party (in the person of anti-gun Governor John Hickenlooper) gets to appoint another anti-gun Democrat to hold the seat until he next general election; the recall would have put a pro-gun Republican in.

Hudak was notorious for abusing a rape victim who was trying to testify about how much she would have liked to have a chance to defend herself. Hudak’s message, essentially, was that a dead rapist was a terrible thing, but being raped was no big deal. Coloradan women should just grin and bear it. B!+c63s had it coming.

Matt at Jerking the Trigger has an interesting analysis of a Glock teaser:

I went all CSI on the teaser photo and adjusted the brightness and contrast of the image (below). You can see that the entire outline of a pistol is visible and, if it is to scale with the Zippo lighter shown, it would be roughly the size of other compact, polymer frames .380s on the market like the Ruger LCP and S&W Bodyguard.

Here’s Matt’s adjusted image. You could go Read The Whole Thing™ to see the before and after versions, and much more informed specularion (including in the comments).

A Glock 42 that’s a .380 would be big news. A Glock that&#821

Eddie Hoffens, from Facebook.

Meet David Hoffens, and Edgar “Eddie” Hoffens, the way the Manchester, NH, police and courts did:

David Hoffens pleaded guilty last month to threatening to kill his brother, Edgar, then pulling out the telephone lines so his brother could not call police. The younger Hoffens was given a suspended six-month sentence, fined $200 and ordered to undergo anger management evaluation.

via Bucket truck, binoculars used in search for gun in Manchester double shooting | New Hampshire Crime.

OK, and meet Charlie Cable, who “has a long history with the police” (in the charming locution of

The USA has the best justice system money can buy. So why isn’t Skakel smiling?

Gently interrogated by the police, murder suspect Michael Skakel threw the trump card: “You can’t touch me! I’m a Kennedy.” And indeed, the Greenwich, CT police didn’t arrest him, even though the golf club that smashed in the 14-year-old’s head came from Skakel’s golf bag, and he admitted peeping in her windows — and abusing himself. He put himself on the scene, owned the weapon, and admitted unrequited lust for the victim. But “You can’t touch me!”

Davenport, Idaho gun dealer Duck Creek Armory is in the news, and not in a good way. Mike Colón at CBS4 has a report:

A Davenport online gun store has been given a grade of “F” by the Better Business Bureau.

The BBB says that it has more than 25 complaints against Duck Creek Armory for non-delivery of ordered products.

Some customers have been waiting for orders since last spring and are out from $800 to $1600 dollars.  Phone calls and letters have not been answered.

The BBB web page has not been updated, but it does contain one horror story of a customer who, four months after paying, with no credible promise of delivery, cancelled his order — and was whacked with a 15% “restocking fee” for a gun Duck Creek Armory apparently never had in stock at any time. (Th

Night over Laos, circa 1966. From a “Nimrod” (A-26K night interdiction aircraft) navigator’s recollections:

Back at altitude, I reflected on our situation. So far, we had made two passes, had maybe 40 to 50 rounds of 37mm, 23mm ZPU and who knows what else fired at us and had only dropped two bombs?!! Considering the fuel and ordnance load we carried, expending at this rate would have us work (and being shot at) for at least 10 passes, maybe many more if we fired the .50-caliber machine guns.

And so it was to be! This squadron’s credo was to be persistent and take the time to inflict the greatest damage on the enemy. That took patience and perseverance-and meant dodging considerable hostile fire.

Having expended all the .50-caliber ammunition, we headed home. On the way back, our FAC reported that we had destroyed several trucks and a couple of AAA positions and that we received an estimated 800 rounds of antiaircraft fire!

On the way back, an absurd conversation from the night before ran through my mind. We were marveling that our government paid us $65 a month combat pay. Now, if we flew a mission like this 25 times a month, that meant we would earn $2.60 per mission

For some time (we first teased it way back in July) we’ve been promising a report on Gerald Bull’s contributions to ballistic science, and his very big gun designs, with emphasis on his 1960s Project HARP, which bid fair to put a satellite in orbit — from a cannon.

This 48-minute TV show is a fair overview of very big guns whose writers obviously hit hard on one of the references we’re using, Bull’s work on the Kaiser-Wilhelmgeschutz of World War I fame. (Not much question about it — they show the book cover in the video). It’s a hard book to find, and expensive when you find it. It’s highly technical (with a lot of ‘sheet music’) and in our view worth every penny.

Bull was reportedly working on a second volume, covering WWII German advances in the state of the art (several of which are shown here), at the time of his death. He carried his manuscript among other papers in his case, which was taken by his murderers and has never surfaced. If it wasn’t immediately destroyed, it likely gathers dust in the vaults of some intelligence agency even now. Unfortu

Webb mugshot. Facial features: Neanderthal, or Fetal Alcohol Syndrome?

Matt Webb’s girlfriend was going to surprise him — on a hunt. At night. And they were both apparently stoned on something or other. There was just no way this was going to end well.

She was last heard from in critical condition but expected to live. He was last heard from in the booking room. The Times Free Press:

Matthew Tyler Webb was hunting deer Thursday night when he heard rustling and saw movement in the woods. But he didn’t know what it was, any of it, he later told police.

The moving and noise quickly stopped. In the silence, police say, Webb fired his rifle.

Immediat

This one’s been rusting in our queue since September, but the link is still good, and the poor guy is still dead. When we say “almost anything can kill a human being, and the only thing that keeps us alive is good fortune and the common decency of 99.repeating9% of humanity” we do indeed mean it.

This young fellow died instantly seconds after some kind of “pilot error” with his favorite plaything, a radio-controlled helicopter. NBC News:

A 19-year-old man playing with a remote control helicopter in Brooklyn, N.Y., lost control of it, sliced off the top of his own head and died Thursday afternoon, law enforcement officials said.
The helicopter enthusiast, identified by officials as Roman Pirozek Jr., and his father were in Calvert Vaux Park at Shore Parkway and Bay 44th Street in Gravesend.
Pirozek also sheared off part of his shoulder, officials said.

Traumatic amputations are survivable, given prompt treatment and evacuation, but not cranial ones.

There’s something particularly sad about his mishap occurring in front of his father, who apparently shared his hobby.

Many people fear guns because they can take hu