Weapons Man

In Monday’s installment, we gave you the overview of the SAW program as of 1979, and we looked in depth at the least radical design, the magazine-fed M16 variant, XM-106 automatic rifle, a product of the Army’s own Ballistic Research Laboratory. Today’s installment will fill you in with a little more on the competition and its history, and will go into a little depth — unfortunately, a little depth is all we have — about the XM-248 and especially its forerunner, the XM-235.

To recap, as of the beginning of 1979 four candidates were being compared for a concept of a Squad Automatic Weapon that was then (barely) filled in the infantry fire team by giving one guy a stamped-steel bipod and permission to set his selector to Crowd Control. Along with the XM106, which was an M16A1 with some concessions to firing high rates and volumes of automatic fire, the contenders at this point were three belt-fed 5.56mm light machine guns: Ford Aerospace’s XM248, FN’s XM249 and H&K’s XM262.

This is a late, and retro post (meaning we’re posting it Thursday, and backdating it to Wednesday. But a retro post is appropriate here because the Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week is John Thomas’s Retro Arms Works. We’ve never met John in person, but we “know” him through the Retro Forum at AR15.com.  And we’re proud to display his workmanship on several of our guns, including an AR15 prototype clone.

The website is lean: it exists primarily to show off his workmanship and provide contact information. The guy is good, reasonable, and prompt. And he has a passion for retro ARs and other historic weapons. His services include machining and several kinds of finishing. Here’s a few words of wisdom yanked from his FAQ:

We specialize in “retro” AR15 parts, but we work on modern parts as well.
When you anodize or parkerize, can you perfectly color match another part? No

Of course, he has legal problems. If the police come to your house because you’re having domestic problems, nothing you can do with a gun is going to improve the situation.

The police in cozy Hampton Falls, NH, in the persons of Chief Robbie Dirsa and Officer Joe Lister, came to Jeff Guyette’s house for that reason. Under New Hampshire law, the police take any weapons owned by the subject of an Restraining Order. That’s pretty standard, and it’s black-letter law. There’s no gun registration in NH, so it’s heavily dependent on the cooperation of the RO subject. (He’s not a “suspect” — an RO is administrative, and in NH as elsewhere it’s a fairly standard negotiating tactic in divorces; for good or for ill, that’s what the lawyers have made of it).

Dirsa said, “In a small town, it’s often like that — you know the people and whatnot — so it’s always difficult” when things go awry.

“I’ve known (Guyette) and his wife for a long time and never expected that (December incident),” Dirs

Gun Death Row in Chicago. White Shirts mark CPD officers who do clerical work because they’re bozos. From the Redeye article linked below.

Steve Chapman at the well-named Reason magazine reports on an old folly in Chicongo, newly brought to light:

In the course of their duties, Chicago police come into possession of all sorts of contraband: jewelry, video games, bicycles, cars. They sell the stuff through online auctions that are open to the public. They also confiscate some 10,000 firearms each year, with an estimated value of $2 million. They sell them and put the $2 million through a shredder.

Just kidding. It would be insane to shred large stacks of perfectly good money. What they actually do is destroy the guns. That way, there’s no money to destroy.

via

In deepest Bloomtopia, in the heart of the greatest gun-free zone in the western hemisphere, a mass murder of five took place. The suspect, Ming Dong Chen, is a 25-year-old illegal immigrant from China, who’d been receiving mental health treatment intermittently from the New York authorities. Apparently, the Bloomberg approach of ingoring the mentally ill and small crimes — cops have recently been told to “back off” the homeless — while pursuing non-violent gun owners relentlessly isn’t working, at least, not if your goal is anything to do with violent crime.

Who could have anticipated that?

A crazed man turned a Sunset Park, Brooklyn, home into a slaughterhouse late Saturday, leaving a 37-year-old mom and her four young children stabbed to death.

Ming Dong Chen, a 25-year-old suspect — preliminarily identified as the children’s mentally troubled older cousin — was arrested after being subdued at the scene, his feet bare and soaked in blood.

Cops seized a machete and scissors from the home as e

We can’t meet the Commando standards of 1940, can you? Some things, yes, and some things, no. Now, in the peak of youth, we could have done it. Here’s an extract from “Service in a Commando” by Lt. Col. AC Newman, who was OC of No. 2 Commando when he drafted this document.

Before they get to the nuts and bolts of physical standards and training requirements, the Commandos want to know what sort of character a recruit has:

Irregular warfare demands the highest standards of initiative, mental alertness and physical fitness, together with the maximum skill at arms. No Commando can feel confident of success unless all ranks are capable of thinking for themselves; of thinking quickly and of acting independently, and with sound tactical sense, when faced by circumstances which may be entirely different to those which were anticipated.

And what sort of mind:

Mentally. The offensive spirit must be the outlook of all ranks of a Commando at all times.

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It’s probably not going to be a disintegrator ray gun. Dang.

Because the XM248 segment of the story is taking longer than we had hoped, we’re going to go for a practical first down again (an American football analogy, for our overseas readers: we’re going to do something easy, but possible, instead of something extremely difficult). As we’ve been immersed in the surprisingly lively RDT&E world of the 1970s, where weapons systems with roots as far back as WWII and Korea were being uprooted by new technology, we began to wonder, what’s going on today? 

And in the world of small arms, the answer is, surprisingly little. The Army is somewhat satisfied with the weapons that they field now. This is partly because the current suite of weapons is pretty good. It’s also because the Army has other priorities that are higher. Army leaders have said that th

We can relate to the natural desire of people to put states in rank order of CC friendliness, having gone from a state with one of the worst concealed carry climates (MA) to a couple of states with much better records.

Not surprisingly, the states with high crime where gruesome murders are in the news tend to be restrictive. This is a correlation only; people can and do argue the way the arrow of causation points.

Some people are not happy with this or that detail of what Guns and Ammo magazine has done to rank the states. We dunno; their results comport pretty well to conventional wisdom. In some cases, they’re quantifying the same variable twice, for instance, when they measure number of states that recognize a permit, they’re measuring something that has an inverse relationship with amount of training time required.

We don’t get why duty to inform is a big issue to them. Unless it is being used as a stick to beat legit gun owners with, which wouldn’t surprise us out of some of these jurisdictions.

But k

If a comb in the wrong hands is a weapon, maybe the problem is not the comb.

This is an old one (September, even), but was peculiar enough we think it’s still worth reviewing. Now, police pressure pinpointed this person Pearson in short order, and Pearson’s presence in prison promptly resumed (and probably persists). But he certainly had a novel way to spring himself from durance vile:

Police in Michigan have captured a fugitive who escaped from a Detroit courthouse Monday after stabbing a sheriff’s deputy in the neck with a plastic comb.

Abraham Pearson was taken into custody Monday night after a brief chase on foot near the intersection of Interstate 94 and Mt. Eliot Road. Law enforcement had received a tip from a citizen who spotted Pearson walking

You think you know what “police” are? You think you have a handle on “fishing?” Welcome to Afghanistan.

The incident took place last Friday in the Doshi district of the northern province of Baghlan when policemen on the bank of a river fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the water.

“The rocket went astray and hit a place where children were playing, killing six and wounding two others,” the interior ministry said in a statement.

“Eight police personnel accused of misusing government weapons that killed these children have been arrested and handed over to military prosecutors for investigation,” it said.

Ahmad Jawid Basharat, a provincial spokesman, confirmed the incident and said the children were aged between 10 and 14.

“The police did not mean to kill the children, they were fishing, but the rocket went astray and hit the other side of the river where children were swimming in shallow water,” he said.

via Afghan Police Fishing with RPG Kill 6 Children | TF&G Gun Report.

We did indeed participate in the fine Afghan sport of fishing with Dupont lures, and our experience may explain a little about what happened over there.

It came about this way: another element of our

The M249 Squad Automatic Weapon is widely distributed in the US Army and Marine Corps (even after the Marines replaced many SAWs with M27 Infantry Automatic Rifles). But how did we get to that point, and what other weapons were considered along the way? This series will look at each of the four contenders in turn. The principal objective of this article is to set the stage, and introduce an unfamiliar cousin of a familiar old friend: the XM106 Automatic Rifle, an M16A1 redesigned by Army engineers for the tactical role once filled by the Browning Automatic Rifle in the American rifle squad.

It’s a bit amazing that a SAW program got any traction at all. In 1979, the Army was concerned about the vintage of its small arms and other systems. While we’re most concerned about small arms here, the Army’s RDT&E guys had to develop it all, and they had their hands full trying to field or develop, at that time:

1. The XM1 Tank (with 105mm gun; not yet named Abrams).
2. The 120mm smoothbore follow-on for the M1. This was principally setting up American manufacture of an already-successful German gun.
3. The Infantry Fighting Vehicle and its cav variant (not yet named Bradley).
4. The Copperhead laser-guided precision artillery shell.
5. The YAH-64 helicopter (“Y”

Aren’t they all?

Expect no new posts today. WeaponsMan.com will be back with new content Monday morning!

We did it! The Matinee was up on Saturday (and nearly on time!), the TW3 (this!) was up on time, and we had a W4 this week as well.

So at least as far as beancounting goes, it looks like a good week.

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, generally the same as the last two weeks, and we loaded 25 posts, one less than last week. The mean post was up to a fairly mainstream 730 compared to last week’s 650 (the TW3 said 640 but the stats have been updated). We continued to exceed our target of 19 posts (3x day x6 days +1 on Sunday); in effect there’s a bonus post daily. Comments were low, 66, down from 81.

Our gratitude to readers, commenters and linkers is sincere and continues. Thanks for validating our efforts.

Our most commented post was “Improved Peace Symbol,” which looked at the history of warfare-positive people

This is one of a bunch of half-written reviews that we’ve had lying around. Because we never stopped watching war and adventure movies; we’ve just gotten lax about the writing. (We’re also slogging through a couple of TV series on DVD, in one case because it ran for years and there’s a boatload of episodes; and in another case, quite frankly, so that you don’t have to endure the series).

But Storming Juno is an example of the kind of thing we like to find: a film with a novel take on war or weapons. In this case, it’s a battle that’s been done to death by everyone from John Wayne and Robert Mitchum to Matt Damon: D-Day. What can you say about D-Day that’s new? Well, you can tell what the Canadians did. The Americans have been covered in great depth, some of the stirring actions of the British have gotten films of their own (there really is room for one just about Pegasus Bridge, and one about Merville Battery, just like there’s still room for a movie about Pointe du Hoc in the American sector). But the Canadians have been pretty nearly skunked, and yet they participated in the air, at sea, and by paratroop and seaborne attack. Indeed, they had their own beach, which now hosts a very nice interpretation center

…but it still might not end well for them.

Consider the case of Edward Dalton Haffey. Haffey was the criminal courts’ equivalent of a Global Elite Gold Frequent Flyer. He’d done time for robbery, burglary, a bunch of drug offenses, and capped it with 20 years for murder. With a resumé like that, he wasn’t the most sought-after cat on Monster.com and he wound up working as a janitor for a chain of porn shops. (If you wondered whether the people in these businesses are sleazy, well, there’s one data point).

Haffey’s boss was one Michael Kuhnhausen, and Mike had a problem. His problem was named Susan, and she was 51, 5’7″ tall, and 250 pounds of angry ER nurse, and she was — for the moment, anyway — his wife. She was about to divorce him, and he needed her, not in any Hollywood emotional way, but because her job gave him health insurance, and his under-the-table porn-shop cleanup-manager gig didn’t. So he offered Haffey a chance to make more money than the small-time hood had ever imagined, let

As in, this hat, worn by the two young Marines on the right, looks more than a little… off.

One thing everybody in other services envies about the Marines is their great-looking uniforms, and the fact that the Marines make a uniform change about as often as our little blue and white oblate spheroid gets a visit from Halley’s Comet. We served in the US Army for 30 years and retired with an entire room full of maybe four different kinds of Class A uniform, a wider range of Class Bs, and about twice as many camouflage patterns as a meeting of the Mississippi Delta Militia and Frog Gigging Gang. Our Marine buddies had a couple sets of As and Bs, and went through two camo changes, one forced by the Army discontinuing the uniform they also wore.

The Marines, though, are about to change their uniforms, and one of the things they want to impose on the Devil-Doggosphere is the freakin’ comical hat worn by the two grim-faced Marines on the right. (You’d be grim-faced, too, at the thought of

We’re talking, of course, about our nemesis, Bubba the Gunsmith. Bubba is dim, but crafty and possessed of a certain animal cunning; he doesn’t appear wearing an oily shirt with an oval “Bubba” name patch embroidered over his heart. Nope, he’s insidious and and the evil he does lives on long after he’s interred; but he may call himself by many other names. (One sure clue: if the guy says, “I got it like that. Sumdood done it,” you’re in the presence of the doer: Bubba his ownself). But in general, you can’t count on the Gump of Gunsmithing to out himself.

Fortunately, while he can hide himself, he can’t hide his effects. By his fruits shall ye know him; Bubba’s telltale spoor is as recognizable as a reindeer herd on the Lapland snows; to follow his sign you only need the skill it takes to follow tracks. Train tracks. Here are a few of the “tells” that suggest that you’re dealing with Bubba’s enthusiastic if untamed craftsmanship:

• #1: Your M16/AR-15 front sight base has screws instead of factory-style taper pins. Double Bubba Points for wood screws. Treble points if it’s visibly canted. The first photo shows a screw-on FSB, which people u

We’ve been meaning to tell the gun-rights nightmare story of Brian Aitken for some time. Finally, our desire to tell this story has been overcome by events, for Brian has told the story himself.

Three years ago this month, thanks mostly to poorly written laws and a vindictive judge, I turned 27 while incarcerated in Mid-State Correctional Facility in Fort Dix, New Jersey.

I got sentenced to seven years in prison for legally owning guns. I had purchased them in Colorado and brought them with me to New Jersey, home to some of the harshest gun laws in the country, where I moved to be closer to my young son. I complied with all of the regulations, but one day the police searched my car and charged me with unlawful possession of a weapon—even though my handguns were locked, unloaded, and in my trunk. The court said it was on me to prove that I wasn’t breaking any laws, which obviously was very difficult. When Reason magazine covered my case, it wrote, “Even the jurors who convicted him seem to have been looking for a reason to acquit him. But the judge gave them little choice.”

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We have just learned that black powder substitute manufacturer Craig Sanborn was convicted of state manslaughter and negligent homicide charges — two counts of each, relating to two deaths — Wednesday in New Hampshire.

Sanborn was the former owner of defunct Black Mag, which made a blackpowder substitute — at least, until a massive explosion destroyed the plant on May 14, 2010.  When the fires were out, two workers’ bodies remained in the wreckage of the building.

The court case ran with great rapidity, and accelerated as it neared the end (indeed, we expected it to conclude today, hence, we didn’t check on Sanborn’s fate. However, the local paper had correctly called it, and we had noted, it ending on the 24th). The prosecution took over two weeks — 12 working days of evidence — to present dozens of witnesses and exhibits. The defense presented two days of testimony. Sanborn’s wife testified, but he did not. Wednesday morning both side presented closing argu

Some people don’t like cats. We get that — they’re not for everybody. And some people like to fool around with primitive weapons, like bows and crossbows. We get that — it’s fun.

What we don’t get is why the intersection of the two sets insists on nailing the furballs that they don’t like, with the arrows or bolts that they do. You may not like cats, but you probably have no problem understanding that not everybody is like you, and some of them may like cats.

As our wise old grandmother used to say, “It takes all kinds to make a world.”

And you know that. And therefore, you refrain from using said third parties’ cats as your personal moving target range.

As we’ve recounted before, not