Weapons Man

“I’m sorry, Dave. I can’t do that.” And the pod bay doors closed… Clunk.

…and listening to the radio. Former Governor John Rowland (R-New-England-”lite-D”-type) has a talk show, and he was talking about the turrible events taking place at Central Connecticut State University, a hopped-up community college in New Britain. Seems a criminal had been seen (see left, a scary black criminal, although Rowland never said the b-word), and in Rowland’s view, the police very sensibly locked down the campus and flooded the zone with LENCO Bearcats and SWAT mall-ninjas, who ran around going “hut-hut-hut” and at least, unlike their brethren of Boston Marathon fame, didn’t have any reported negligent discgharges.

At 1600 the AUTHORITAHs had a press conference, and fortunately (or unfortunately, as it may be) the traf

Here’s an interesting gun for sale on Gun Broker:

Pre-ban Sendra manufactured semi auto retro-mode AR-10 rifle(Portuguese contract) . Steel made lower receiver has matching serial number with an upper. Correct plastic handguard and pistol grip. Replacement wood buttstock. The gun is in excellent shape with bright and shiny bore.It comes with two original 1st generation magazines.

via AR10 retro Armalite original Portuguese Sendra mfg : Semi Auto Rifles at GunBroker.com.

We have one of these on a different receiver. The Sendra receiver is machined from steel billet. It may be less authentic (the factory receivers were 7075 machined forgings) but it’s more durable; alloy AR-10 receivers, including Armalite’s and Artillerie Inrichtingen’s, are prone to a little distortion or bowing in the magwell area.

There are several differences between the Portuguese AR10s (more common, althought that’s not saying much) and the Sudanese model. The Porto AR10s have the handguards with a metal

Priceless. At least as far as humor is concerned.

Ads in several international military arms magazines this year have included ads for Remington Defense, with the URL: http://remington-defense.com/

And here’s what you get when you go there:

No word on whether Remington put a bad URL in the ads, or just didn’t pay their renewal fee when their domain expired, or maybe some contract copywriter or art director got the URL wrong.

But it’s a screwup any way you look at it.

Remingtondefense.com (without the hyphen) resolves to Remington Defense’s usual URL, Remingtonmilitary.com. The site now features other Freedom Group products, like the ACR and AAC suppressors.

That’s probably what they wanted the readers of magazines like Armada to see, and not the smilimng GoDaddy crew.

On one level, this just couldn’t happen to a nicer guy. Lots of people have political or human-rights grievances with one goverrnment entity or another, but you can’t just go around shooting people. For one thing, people will shoot back at you:

A blood-drenched Paul Ciancia lay stunned on the floor of LAX, critically wounded after heroic airport cops blasted him in the face to halt his deadly march Friday through Terminal 3 that left one Transportation Security Administration agent dead and six other people wounded.

The shocking photo obtained by The Post shows the critically injured Ciancia, hands cuffed behind his slim body, staring off into space, next to a thick, bright pool of his own blood as medical personnel treat his mangled face.

The shocking photo obtained by The Post shows the critically injured Ciancia, hands cuffed behind his slim body, staring off into space, next to a thick, bright pool of his own blood as medical personnel treat his mangled face.

via

Blackbeard’s ship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, went to the briny deep almost 300 years ago, and was reported to have 40 cannons. 30 have been found in the wreck — and 22 have been raised now, with the help of an unusual team including archaeologists, divers… and a US Coast Guard cutter.

[Project Director Billy Ray] Morris told the News-Times that 30 cannons have been discovered at the site and at least eight remain on the ocean floor. As of Monday, 22 cannons have been raised from the wreckage.

“We know the records state that the Queen Anne’s Revenge had 40 cannons, and I believe we’ll find some more before it’s all over, but I’m not sure if we’ll find all 40,” he said.

via Archaeologists recover 5 cannons from wreck of Blackbeard’s ship | Fox News.

Queen Anne’s Revenge had been a French slaver before being taken by Blackbeard and refitted as a pirate ship. In June, 1718, she ran agro

We were going to move on to the XM262 before circling back to the XM249 (the ultimate winner), but despite having devoted two posts to the Rodman Labs ingenious XM235/XM248 LMB, we’re still getting questions about it. Many of them relate to the feed mechanism, and why it’s better. Well, along with the patent for the gun itself, three of the Rodman engineers took out a patent specifically on the feed mechanism: 4,061,074 A, which notes it’s “also published as 3,999,461″ — the main XM235/248 patent! Here’s 4,061,074A at Google Patents, but we’ll try to explain it in this post for you. Here’s the image that is on the first page of the patent, see if you can figure out what’s happening here. Muzzle’s to the left, belt entering from the bottom at left. Some key parts (these numbers are used in all the drawings):

• 10, 20: lower and upper receiver tube/gas tube (there are two, upper and lower, and they’re identical, interchangeable parts. Each contains a gas piston and return spring).
• 12: feed cam assembly. This contains a slot to drive it in rotary motion, and a row of seven saw – or gear-teeth on the nose to engage matching teeth on the sprocket (32) in ratchet fashion.
• 2

We’ve had some unseasonably (but not unreasonably) good weather here lately, and we’re hoping for a nice Sunday conducive to worthwhile activities.

Hope you have the same.

Another week of hitting most of our self-imposed objectives. This could get boring!

Output did flag midweek, with only two posts showing for Wednesday, and one of the a Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week that was posted Thursday and backdated.

The links are not yet live; to find the posts scroll down. Enjoy!

This week we remained close to the historical mean on words, at roughly 17,000 words, slightly less than the last two weeks, and we loaded 25 posts. Here’s the trend: 25, same as 25, which was down from 26.. which was up from 22. So it looks fairly normal.  We did have three posts which totaled over 4500 words on the 1970s Army Squad Automatic Weapon competition, and there’s a couple more to go. With footnotes and some better pictures it would make a nice article; it would need a lot more work to make a book, but someone should write a book about this interesting and dynamic development cycle.

We’ve strayed a bit off “boring statistics”… or off 

CIA assassin, Emerson Kent, is traumatized when one of his targets isn’t alone — and a child must also be killed. His dissatisfaction with roaming the world murdering whatever random people he’s been instructed to kill has been building for a while, and now he breaks down. Usually, assassins with qualms just get added to the to-do list of assassins who haven’t developed qualms yet — that is what Emerson has been doing — but the malevolent forces of Big Intel give him another shot.

As part of a process of psychological recovery, he’s sent to a remote former NATO airfield in Ireland, in which the Agency operates a Numbers Station: a radio station where someone reads strings of numbers into the ether, 24/7. The numbers are coded instructions to secret agents, more specifically, assassins, of whom the CIA apparently has dozens and dozens, each one waiting like an automaton for the string of numbers that tells him who to whack.

People often say that guns in the home are a threat to children. Nope. Absence of parental supervision is the threat, as this tragedy from September shows:

Joshua Cartee, 32, was arrested Friday evening, one day after his two year old son Jordan was taken to Children’s Medical Center. Jordan remains in critical condition.

The Collin County Sheriff confirms Jordan was found in the car around 2:30 p.m on Thursday, next to a home in the 9300 block of Sam Rayburn Parkway. He was breathing when he was found.  Temperatures were in the mid-90s. Police say the child was able to get out of the home and into the car on his own unnoticed.

via Toddler Found In Hot Car Remains In Critical Condition, Father Arrested « CBS Dallas / Fort Worth.

No guns were needed. Kid couldn’t have gotten any deader with a .454 Casull.

With cooler weather coming to most of the USA, there’ll be fewer of these incidents. (They’ll be happening in Australia and Argentina for the next few months).

We’ve always wondered what public purpose is served by criminalizing this kind of parental negligence, or even temporary oversight. (Since this is the second t

Every picture tells a story:

This story is one China’s state-controlled media is telling its people — with its new submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and its several generations of IRBMs/ICBMs, it has a single integrated operations plan that Chinese generals expect would produce victory in a nuclear war with the United States.

Chinese ballistic missile submarine Type 094, Jin-Class, with crew manning the rail. It is armed with 12 to 16 JuLang-2 missiles. CCTV.

The red, orange and yellow shaded areas depict areas in which population would be

As you read this, we’re enroute to Camden, Maine for the memorial service for Col. Robert Rheault. This begins an intensive period of work and personal travel, and posting and definitely responses to comments (including approval of comments from new commenters) may be delayed. We did queue up some posts to keep you entertained, of course.

And there are some past posts we commend to you:

• Ave atque vale, COL Robert Rheault

And the three parts published so far on the SAW competitions of the 1970s, particularly the four-sided last throwdown of 1979:

• The SAWs that never WAS: Intro, and XM106
• The SAWs that never WAS: Part 2, the XM-248′s forerunner, XM235
• The SAWs that never WAS: Part 3, XM248

There are at least two more parts coming, on the H&K and FN contenders. We will have a Matinee and maybe even a TW3 for you today, too.

Obverse of a Ford Aerospace handout promoting the XM248. This is the second (final) version.

In the first part of this story, we looked at the least technically advanced of the 1979 contenders in the final round of US Army Squad Automatic Weapon tests: the XM106 Automatic rifle, a heavy-barrel M16A1 with a bipod, quick-change barrel, and ability to fire from the open bolt. In the second installment, we started telling the story of the most technically advanced contender, the XM248, but to do that we had to look at the history of the competition and its forerunner, the XM235.

As we left the competition, in approximately 1977, the XM235 certainly had the inside track. The Army reluctantly abandoned the idea of a 6.0 x 45 mm cartridge, and chose to stick with the 5.56 for logistical and Alliance-political reasons.

This is a report of considerable antiquity (as in, eight months ago) that we’d forgotten about. But it deserves examination and will make the residents of about 46 states glad they don’t live in a hell-hole like this.

Fifteen of the 20 police officers put on paid administrative leave for letting their gun permits expire were back on the job Tuesday, costing the department nothing more than some stress, Quincy police officials said.The 15 had renewed their gun permits, and the remaining five officers were expected to be back to work by Wednesday, according to Police Captain John Dougan. He noted that department had previously said 21 officers were put on leave, but had incorrectly counted one officer.

Regarding the financial impact of the paid time off, Dougan said, “There is no cost aspect of it. It didn’t cost us anything.”

One officer was put on administrative leave on Friday, and after a spot check of gun permits Friday, the rest of the officers were placed on lea

Some Tunisians want an Islamist government. But it’s not “some” like “some Egyptians”, who may be the majority. In laid-back Tunisia, the life of an Islamist extremist is a frustrating and lonely one. Sometimes his death is, too:

Officials say a suicide bomber detonated on an empty beach in front of a hotel in the Tunisian Mediterranean resort town of Sousse. He was the only fatality. An employee at the hotel told the BBC the blast occurred at 09:45 local time (08:45 GMT) close to the Riadh Palms hotel and that no-one was hurt except for the bomber.
The male attacker was wearing a belt of explosives according to Tunisia’s Tap state news agency. The AFP news agency reported that witnesses said the bomber was spotted and chased from the hotel onto an empty beach where he blew himself up.
In a separate plot to attack ex-President Habib Bourguiba’s tomb, security sources say police captured another would-be suicide bomber before he could detonate.

via

…in Iraq may be coming due. The US and Iraq were glad to go their separate ways back in 2011: the Administration had promised a bugout, and Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki, heading a narrowly sectarian Shiite government, figured without the hated Yankees he could get his ethnic cleanse on. But the Sunnis (including a persistent strain of ex-Ba’athists who honed their insurgency skills at American expense, and a separate strain of al-Qaeda Islamists) and Shiites (the most barbaric of whom form two groups: Iranian-inspired and Iranian-controlled) are neither one strong enough to exterminate the other.

Hognose’s Law of Wars of Identity is this: In a War of Identity, where you’re not fighting for some objective like a border or a beachhead, but because of who the other guy fundamentally is,  there are only three possible outcomes:

1. One side defeats and exterminates the other. (Have you met a Carthaginian lately? The Punic Wars were Wars of Identity, and this is how they ended).
2. One s

Now that’s a big firearms auction. We showed you guys an authenticated Battle of the Little Bighorn Springfield trapdoor carbine before the auction (and note, we may have said it was in .45-70, we think it was actually in .45-55 caliber). And it sold at the auction for $126,500. That was right in the middle of the range Julia estimated. While auction estimates are often lowballs, intended to encourage bidding, the best pieces in this auction came in within, or very close to, the estimated range — either James D. Julia’s estimates are better than average, or the market is a bit soft.

If you call a market where many exotic collector pieces find new collections at five- and six-figure prices soft.

The entire 3 days of the auction was predominantly high valued items. In fact, this auction is believed to have had the greatest number of high valued firearms; over 523 items generated $10,000 or more. 167 items gene

Another New Yorker has lost his permit, his guns and may yet lose his liberty for having three rounds of ammunition too many — ten instead of seven.

LOCKPORT – A Lockport man who found himself at the center of controversy two weeks ago when he was charged under an unpopular section of the SAFE Act, limiting ammunition in a magazine, has been ordered by a Niagara County judge to hand over his pistol permit and all his handguns.

Paul A. Wojdan, 26, of Parkwood Drive, was a passenger in a vehicle pulled over by Lockport police Oct. 12, when he was charged after surrendering a loaded semiautomatic handgun in a holster retrieved from the glove compartment.

Although the gun was legal, the ammunition wasn’t. He had 10 rounds of 9 mm ammunition in the magazine, violating the new law, which limits a magazine to seven rounds. He was charged with unlawful possession of an ammunition feeding device, a misdemeanor.

Last weekend, Niagara County sheriff’s deputies were sent to Wojdan’s home to confiscate his pistol permit and handguns.

Rochester, New York’s loss is Summerville, South Carolina’s gain as American Tactical Imports relocates 117 jobs from a hostile to a welcoming environment. The firm will spend $2.7 million setting up the new plant and warehouse.

New York politicians did not comment on this latest move, but in the past have spoken of firearms industry employers and their employees with contempt. ATI’s most popular firearms have been banned in New York since Governor Andrew Cuomo pushed through the so-called SAFE act on an emergency basis

Here’s an ad for American Tactical’s products, specifically, home defense shotguns:

As an importer, their line changes frequently. Possibly their best known gun at present is the imitation .22LR StG-44. That gun currently shows as out of stock and they’re blowing out the

Some are domestic. Like… domestic cats. We thought, since we’ve been pretty heavy on the animal-lover side, we’d give a guy who developed a weapon that deals summarily (and in his design, non-lethally) with pesky neighborhood moggies that spray your stuff… there are a million ideas here for the handy WeaponsMan.

Plus, it will make you laugh.

Craig Turner did not see complete success with this iteration of the cat popper, so he built another version, and that’s on YouTube too… but if you like this video (and can tolerate a bit of salty language), his outtakes video is even funnier.