Weapons Man

We’re always a bit… diffident about Veterans’ Day. I think part of it is that “veterans” were always guys like Mr Ruckdeschel, who was in the Airborne in WWII, or Uncle Ovide, who was out ahead of Macarthur’s guys in the Philippines, or all the fine men who mentored us, men who came back from Korea and Vietnam to a nation that could not give a rat’s ass.

Now, we have a seldom-equalled appreciation for our young people returning from the fight, and even those that oppose the fight have mostly turned from the 1960s and 70s tactic of vilifying the warriors. (There are some exceptions, but they’re mostly wrinkly relics of the actual 60s and 70s, 40 years older and no iota smarter).

Today, we are far from home, but with family, and that is a good and Godly thing. Tomorrow we expect to join the teeming throngs on the nations’ highways. We’re almost done with the audio book that’s been our companion for the last 700 miles, Frozen in Time, the story of mens’ hardship on the Greenland ice, and the decades’-later efforts to make the glacier give up her dead. Highly recommended. But soon it will end — a measure of a good audiobook is that you want to get back on the road and see what happens next — and we’re open to audiobook

This week was characterized by heavy travel and lots of activity in analog world, making our digital selves a bit scarcer that we’d have liked. Despite that we did achieve most of our self-imposed objectives.

Once again midweek was the nadir, with only two posts showing for Wednesday.

The links are live; to find the posts scroll down. Enjoy!

To our surprise, our article and word count wasn’t far off the norm despite dead Wednesday: 24 posts and around 16,500 words (we don’t have a final word count cause we’re still writing this).  We had two more detailed posts about the 1970s Squad Automatic Weapon Program that we began last week.

The mean post size dipped just below 700, but it was “saved” by a couple of big Saturday posts, including Part 4 of the SAW story.  (The median was only 400). We are exceeding the post count desired metric of 19 still.

The pressure cooker sat in a typical still life of Boston river shoreline: debris, trash and filth discarded by the rich and poor alike of the deep-blue city, confident that the all-benevolent Government will clean up after them.

But wait! That’s a pressure cooker! (Boston Herald photo of the offending pot by Mark Garfinkel). People can make them into bombs. Call for Help! Call the Government! So the Government responded, in the form of dozens and vehicles and swarms of cops from two agencies. HP ensued.

Threee bomb-squad aces examined the pressure cooker. It was half buried in mud. It contained something resembling… mud. Occam’s Razor tells you we are discussing a discarded pot full of mud.

And if you’re today’s Deputy Quiversome and Patrolman Pusillanimous, there’s only one right answer for this: blow it in place! So they closed Kenmore Square (a major traffic problem even when it’s open), pushed ci

Boston, where guns are more or less outlawed (unless you’re connected, IYKWIMAITYD), is pretty much a laboratory for what life in gun control paradise would be like. And the answer is: often, remarkably like Hobbes’s famous description of the State of Nature: “life is nasty, brutish, solitary, and short… the war of each against each.”

“Bad blood” on the special Home Depot display team that decks the halls with Christmas cheer led to a stabbing in Aisle 13 in a Quincy store yesterday, police said.

Jamal Boyd, 36, of Mattapan will be arraigned on assault with intent to murder charges today after he used a pocket knife to slash Corey Frederick, 37, of Cambridge shortly after 8 a.m. yesterday in the store’s doors and windows section, police said. Frederick underwent surgery at Boston Medical Center and was in critical condition.

The group that Boyd and Frederick were on is called, we are not making this up, the Merchandising Execution Team.

“We know there was some bad blood,” Quincy police Chief Paul

“Masada” is an Anglicization of an old Hebrew word that means fortress – any fortress, but there is only one capital-M Masada, and the story is familiar to Jew and Gentile alike. It is the story of a small band of never-quit Jewish rebels who took themselves to Masada, originally built as King Herod the Great’s equivalent of a modern dictator’s or quisling’s numbered Swiss bank account (or a survivalist’s bunker — one gets the impression that James Wesley, Rawles, would approve of Herod’s emergency arrangements). Herod the Great was the father of the AD-era Herod Antipas, who was the Romans’ quisling du jour at the time of the events in the film. The legend of Masada is tailor-made to be a historical film, and yet, this made-for-TV miniseries is so ill-remembered these days, that most people think it never has been.

Allegedly antisemitic, arguably anti-American, rangey and cadaverous of appearance and impractical and doctrinaire of thought, foreign-born Samantha Power was always a … curious … choice for UN Ambassador. But she is probably a pretty good marker for how the Administration feels about its combat veterans: in general, it prefers those who betrayed them. Power’s Vets’ day message for you: “There is no greater embodiment of being outspoken on behalf of what you believe in — and being ‘all in’ in every way — than Jane Fonda.”

New U.S. ambassador to the UN Samantha Power didn’t waste her diplomatic skills on Vietnam veterans at a New York speech, praising actress Jane Fonda for “being outspoken on behalf” of her convictions.

Power, 43, was speaking at the United Nations Association of the USA 2013 Global Leadership Awards in New York Wednesday.

“Hi everybody,” Power said, according to a transcript. “You know life has changed when you’re hanging out with Jane Fonda backstage. There is no greater e

Afghans have a saying about the cruel and charismatic guerilla leader Gulbuddin Hekmatayar: “If a man is ever once Gulbuddin’s man, he’s Gulbuddin’s man for life.” That saying reflects the fanatical loyalty Gulbuddin’s minions feel towards him.

The equivalent in the gun world is Heckler & Koch fanboys.

There are good and logical reasons to be an HK fanboy. The guns are well-engineered, and better-built; they’re typical products of German engineering, in that they are both complex and elegantly designed. The HK light machine guns have never had the commercial success of the rifles and submachineguns built on the same principles. But this is not because they’re badly designed; HK weapons, when they are not the best in the world, are usually among the best in the world.

The HK23E below is a 5.56mm light machine gun descended from the gun we’re talking about today: the XM262 SAW.

Over half a million, actually. That’s what our counter says, for 2013 so far.

Thanks to you, our readers, for coming here to read, to comment, and not only to learn but to teach us in our turn. Our gratitude is unbounded.

Solid Concepts of Austin, TX, the company that made this first known 3D printed metal gun, calls it the “1911 DMLS” — the letters stand for Direct Metal Laser Sintering. Here it is put to the test:

Most of the gun is made of 17-4 Stainless Steel, but some parts including the hammer, grip safety and mainstring housing are made of Inconel 625, a high-temperature, high-stress alloy commonly used in jet turbine hot section shafts. DMLS can also produce titanium alloy parts, although this technology demonstrator contains none. The grips are composite and were themselves produced by Selective Laser Sintering. Springs and, we believe, fasteners, were the only non-printed parts. All parts were printed to net shape and no printed part required machining (although there was a little hand-fitting and -finishing). Th

Gun bansters are fond of lumping suicides in with accidents, murders and justifiable homicides and calling the whole mess “gun violence” as if they were all the same thing. They’re not for several reasons. If you could prevent justifiable homicides, that would probably be a bad thing, as the rebalancing of power in favor of the criminals would likely produce assaults, rapes and homicides of productive citizens.

And if you could prevent suicides…. well, how would anybody ever do that? Because if someone’s going to committ self-destruction, he or she doesn’t need a gun. A balcony will do just fine, aided by 9.8 ms*s (32 fps*s) natural acceleration and that sudden stop at the end:

The death of a 42-year-old woman who died from her injuries after an 11-story fall from her Stamford high-rise balcony Tuesday night has been ruled a suicide, police said.

Police Lt. Diedrich Hohn said an autopsy performed Wednesday by the Office of the Chief State Medical Examiner

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel recently spoke to the clubby gathering of deskbound defense intellectuals that is CSIS (Center for Strategic and International Studies). It was an important speech, if you want to know how Hagel and the Obama Administration envision the future of US defense.

CSIS is a think-tank of “security intellectuals,” which can generally be defined as plush desk-warmers who want to play with real armies the way they maneuvered their toys on a playroom floor, and with about as much understanding. It is nominally bipartisan, but tilts left, towards whatever is the Democrats’ current policy position, although it operates more of a Beltway-vs-America axis than a Left-vs-Right axis. While Hagel spent some time as one of these plush chairwarmers, he is a true outlier in that he actually served in the military in combat, something the CSIS crowd generally consign to the unwashed lower classes.

After some inside-baseball jokes with the assembled chairwarmers, Hagel laid out his six-point plan, which we’ll subject to cynical analysis:

First, we will continue to focus on institutional reform. Coming out of more than a decade of war and budget growth, there is a clear op

Here are a few more facts. From a story at US News.com:

• The cops are now saying that a drug dog “alerted” on Eckert’s rump. “[David Eckert's attorney Shannon] Kennedy alleges the dog is not certified to search for drugs and may actually be a pet.”

• “It’s unclear why the colonoscopy was necessary after enemas and x-rays did not reveal hidden drugs.”
• “Eckert was sent a $6,000 bill for the medical procedures he involuntarily underwent, his lawyer says.”
• “[Eckert] also wants to guard his privacy and doesn’t want to be known as “the anally probed guy.”  Hmmm. In our estimation, that ship has sailed.
• “Maybe the officers who did this don’t like him living in their community,” said Kennedy. “He’s a white boy, a scraggly white boy, and all these officers are Hispanic. It’s a New Mexico thing.”

Maybe it is. If a state thought that fictional meth kingpin Walter White helped their reputation, maybe something’s going on there.

And a

Had to stand a facility inspection, then drive a little bit. OK, drive 660 miles overnight. We’re pretty good at multitasking but aren’t going to blog at 85 (nor blog in our sleep, which is what followed the drive).

This morning PT calls and some work is happening on next SAW competition post. We’re finally moving on from the XM235/248 and will be hitting the XM262 next. We’ll try to make up for lost posts by week-end. We believe any comments formerly stuck in the queue are posted now.

Special Agents from every other Federal Agency are snickering today, as the FBI has had to resort to a lot of begging (and a $20,000 reward, but mostly, begging) for clues about the whereabouts of two Bureau weapons pictured here (these are actually similar weapons that the FBI hadn’t yet misplaced, as of press time).

The two guns are an M16A1 updated to quasi-M4 carbine (which is a pretty typical FBI carbine), and a McMillan-stocked 7.62mm sniper rifle (again, a very typical Bureau weapon). The M16 has a carbine barrel and gas system, an EoTech sight, and a backup sight set to co-witness with the EoTech. It also has a Streamlight TL-1.

The Boston Herald has two separate stories on where the guns vanished from (on the same page!). One, a print story, quotes a Bureau official as saying that the guns were lifted from a SWAT vehicle that responded to a callout in Andover, Massachusetts. The video at the same link, from a Bo

This doesn’t happen every day:

The planes hit at an altitude of 12,000 feet when one plane came over the top of the other and got caught up in it’s turbulence, causing the plane’s to collide.

The wings came off of the plane that was hit and it started on fire, disintegrating on it’s way to the ground.

Skydivers in both planes were just getting ready to jump when the collision happened and were able to get out of the planes and out of harm’s way.

The pilot of the trail plane was able to land safely, while the pilot of

We have made a W4 of a dead blog before, but that was inadvertently. This time we’re linking to a blog that we’re pretty sure is pining for the fjords. It hasn’t seen a post since April 12, 2013. And that’s a crying shame, because Firearms Designer is insightful, informed, factual, and for its brief moment in the sun, episodically prolific.

If anybody knows what happened, please drop a note in the comments. One would like to hope the blog’s author simply ran out of time for this avocation. But also, looking at his posting history, there is often a flurry of posts and then a months-long dry spell. There’s been nothing since April, 2013, but maybe the site will come back.

And consider this: even if it does not, the site remains a treasure trove of design information.

Some of our favorite posts were:

• An ongoing series on machining AR parts from 0%-machined raw forgings (these are the most recent posts at this tim

If you have just been pulled over for a moving violation, and you think you just saw a cop checking out your buns, you might just be right.

And if your natural reaction to that is stark staring terror, we’re not going to call you paranoid. Well, we might, but we bet David Eckert won’t. Here’s his story:

[Dangerous criminal Eckert, nabbed for a rolling-stop at a stop sign] appeared to be clenching his buttocks.  Law enforcement thought that was probable cause to suspect that Eckert was hiding narcotics in his anal cavity.  While officers detained Eckert, they secured a search warrant from a judge that allowed for an anal cavity search.

The lawsuit claims that Deming [New Mexico] Police tried taking Eckert to an emergency room in Deming, but a doctor there refused to perform the anal cavity search citing it was “unethical.”

But physicians at the Gila Regional Medical Center in Silver City agreed to perform th

While you’re contemplating the AR-10 auction we showed you this morning early, here’s a single seller whose rifles for sale include a very good collection of early Colt semi-auto SP1 Sporters. These guns have a collector following that’s only partly overlapping with aficionados of early military guns and builders of retros. For one thing, the Colts are unquestionably original factory firearms, even if they’re sadly bowdlerized compared to military AR-15s and M16s of the same period, and that alone assures them some collector interest. This is especially true of the 1964-66 very early SP1s — an SP1 serial number list has been published, which allows fairly confident dating — that this one seller has.

The gem of this stack of early Colts is this 1964 model. How do we know it’s a ’64? Oh. This is how: