Weapons Man

If you’ve been used to carrying a gun every day, you hate being without one, but frogmen have long had to either go without, or use special underwater weapons. The reason is the fundamental difference between aero- and hydro-dynamics: weapons efficient in the air are much less so in the denser medium, water. Weapons efficient underwater are hopelessly compromised on the surface. A number of unsatisfactory options for the combat swimmer include: just carrying a knife for undwerwater action; having two separate weapons; doing without armament during the underwater phase; training to bring a handgun into contact with an underwater opponent.

For quite a few years Russia has been working on a single multipurpose sub- and surface gun, which would allow them to retire their special purpose underwater weapons

Ah, Chicongo.

The slug of the smug mugshot here, is waiting for trial there, on terrorism charges. He just earned himself another charge:

A New Hampshire man awaiting trial in Illinois on terrorism charges related to the NATO protests last year was reportedly charged with aggravated battery for allegedly squirting a Cook County correctional officer with a shampoo bottle filled with urine and feces.

Prosecutors said Saturday that Jared Chase, 29, of Keene N.H., attacked the officer from his jail cell on Oct. 4, according to a report from the Chicago Sun-Times.

Chase was one of three men known as the “NATO 3,” who were accused during the NATO Summit in Chicago of plotting to fire

Most everybody knows Bill Mauldin’s excellent cartoons and likes them, apart from George Patton, who was outraged that Mauldin’s Willie and Joe were unkempt while in the line. Patton tried to have Mauldin, who was mercifully not under his chain of command, court-martialed; Mauldin retorted with a cartoon mocking Patton’s habit of imposing fines on soldiers not wearing the more impractical parts of the Army uniform (it was 25¢ for being caught in the 3rd Army area without your tie, a fashion accessory whose relation to combat only Patton could explain).

But men have always gone to war with a sense of humor, and it’s often been expressed by cartoons. In World War I, the now little-remembered 77th Division, AEF, had its own soldier-cartoonist, Captain P.L. Crosby. (Mauldin, also, came from a unit that is undeservedly little-remembered today, the 45th “Thunderbird” Infantry Division, a unit with a lot of real cowboys and Indians in it). Here are a couple

We were going to blog this from an engagement dynamics point of view — it was a very near-run thing, that began as a routine traffic stop, and ended, fortunately, with the bad guy dead (although he speeds away at the end of the video, he didn’t get far before succumbing to his wounds). But it turns out Chris Hernandez, who has military experience but also a long career as a street cop in a tough city, has thoroughly and thoughtfully blogged the engagement. We strongly urge you to Read The Whole Thing™ (and the rest of his blog! And his book!) but here’s a taste.

The movement of [bad guy John Van Allen]‘s right arm as he reaches under his uniform shirt is obvious from the camera angle, and I’d guess it would be even more obvious to the officer, standing outside the driver’s door. My guess, and it’s just a guess, is that the officer [Trooper Matt Zistel, Oregon State Police] didn’t fire at this point because Allen was wearing a US Army uniform. Most cops consider members of the military to be fellow “men of the cloth”, so to speak. That doesn’t mean we won’t treat them like criminals when they act like criminals, but it does mean cops generally are hesitant to fire on someone wearing

We all believe in “peace.” Of course, that means different things to different people. Marxists want peace. So do Islamists. Their idea of peace involves you — as a slave. Various hippies, lefties, and academics think the path to peace is to appease. Calmer heads — Teddy Roosevelt swinging his Big Stick of a Navy; Kipling explaining the philosophy of Dane-Geld; Churchill exploding over Chamberlain’s cave at Munich; Reagan turning back his opponents’ unilateral nuclear disarmament and Nuclear Freeze proposals — know that peace is best gained from a negotiating position that can be respected.

Like at your opponent’s throat. Peace, as we say, through superior firepower.

1942 version T-34/76. Note how small the two-man (commander/gunner and loader) turret is. The quality of these tanks, and the courage of their crews, was an unpleasant surprise for the Germans.

What was it like to go to war in a tank on the Eastern Front? How did it feel? This book answers that, and many other things besides. What was it like, to go to war and lose your best friends? Your entire tank crew?

What was it like, to be inside a tank when fire broke out? What was the workload of a tank commander in the T-34/76?

Vasiliy Bryukhov answers these questions, and more, in Red Army Tank Commander: At war in a T-34 on the Eastern Front. Let’s give you an excerpt that answers the last question first:

Nowadays some people are so good at telling stories — I am amazed that they remember the names of the settlements near where they fought. How could I recall th

You may remember that Bradley Manning, the swishy, troubled intelligence analyst now doing a long sentence in Leavenworth,  copied classified files for distribution while lip-synching to Lady Gaga. We don’t know what it is with the autotune star and blowing off one’s oath of office, but it looks like fandom is not working out well for another serviceman, this one in the Navy.

A high profile U.S. Navy commander has been charged with accepting paid travel, the services of prostitutes and Lady Gaga concert tickets from a Singapore-based defense contractor in exchange for classified information according to federal prosecutors.

Commander Michael Vannak Khem Misiewicz, who was born in Cambodia during the Vietnam War and gained media attention for his rise to captain of a U.S. Navy destroyer, has been arrested on federal bribery charges – in what some are calling the worst scandal to hit the Navy in decades.

Also taken into custody and charged in criminal complaints unsealed in U.S. district court in Sa

The title is liable to be parsed both ways, but while the author of the site may be a fan of war fiction that’s great, his real focus is the fiction of the Great War. Fortunately for readers, he also has an interest in the war’s poetry, one of the most remarkable bodies of work in the English language: remarkable for its strength, quality, and range of emotions.

Yes, it’s plenty deep enough to keep a website going.

The site is: http://greatwarfiction.wordpress.com

The more you know about the Great War in image and on page, the more you will enjoy this site. The War, of course, slew a generation of Europeans and toppled thrones of centuries’ standing, with victors spared little of the anguish and misery visited on vanquished. The emotions and forces unleashed in World War I made its one-day receipt of a distinguishing numeral, unthinkable as late as the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, or even the Oxford Declaration of 1938, inevitable.

But there was the real war, and the psychological and artistic war, the memetic war. The delta between the two is explored at some length in Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory.  One gets a sense that the author of the Great War Fiction website would squabble tes

Over the weekend, we put up two back Saturday Matinees, which we’d intended to publish and had not done. They’re both interesting films and we think you will like the reviews. The first is Cross of Iron, the 1978 Eastern Front bloodbath, directed by Sam Peckinpah and featuring a great cast including James Coburn, Max Schell, James Mason, David Warner and Senta Berger. This was meant to go up on September 14th (Week 37) but the review sat unfinished until we rescreened the movie with Kid (he gave it two thumbs up, himself).

The other was Night Bombers, a 1981 BBC TV documentary that uses rare color film to tell the story of 24 hours in the life of a bomber station, squadron, and crew.  This is the only color film of Lancaster operations, including combat footage over the target, planning footage at Number 1 Group HQ, and mission prep footage on the airfield. It’s hard to find, and watching a thready old VHS copy (which we recorded into a Mac so we could screencap some stills) made us realize we really need a multiregion DVD player for stuff like this — the DVD is Europe only (Region 2).

Both of these are worthwhile films and we’d like to think we’ve told the story with good reviews, which have been backdated to their original intended dates, but can be linked from this

Curious George. Oops, sorry, Luis Santana. You can see how we made the error.

Apparently Connecticut governor, red-diaper Dannell Malloy (his parents were too stoned to spell “Daniel”), may be on to something with his beloved gun bans. Why, the local criminals have had to resort to throwing parrots at the cops!

While being chased by a cop, a Connecticut man allegedly threw a parrot at his uniformed pursuer, who was bit on the hand when trying to shield himself from the feathered projectile.

Luis Santana, 32, was arrested Tuesday night on several charges, including assaulting a police officer, disorderly conduct, and animal cruelty.

A patrolman responding to a call about a fight encountered Santana on a Waterbury street around 10 PM. When Santana bolted, bird in hand, Officer Gary Kichar gave chase.

While fleeing, Santana turne

A real plasma blade and the phased pulse generator that makes it work. Courtesy Peak Medical / Medtronic.

For reasons known but to God, a 2009 story has gone viral this month. It has to do with a ‘plasma knife’ that was tested in that fiscal year by USASOC medical personnel. The pictures are usually illustrated with a cutesy Star Wars light-sabre graphic. Not quite. The high-tech but highly nonmartial iteration of this medical tool is illustrated at left.

However, the story is not only stale, there’s a bigger story there, about what a priority combat casualty care is isn’t to the E Ring and DOD suits in general. And naturally, the “Dan

We’re so going to hell for that title. But we couldn’t resist.

Here’s a bare teaser of a video from the NRA’s National Firearms Museum. We’ve never been there, but a friend who often visits raves about it. Here’s a teaser they did of one of their guns:

People often ask why the US was unique in fielding semi-auto weapons nearly universally in World War II. The only other nation that had tried to go semi-auto, Russia, retreated to bolt-action simplicity until the war was won. (In 1945, they finally introduced a practical and reliable semi-auto, the SKS-45, only to replace it within a few years with the AK, which hit mass production in the early fifties). Germany supplemented its Mausers with semi-autos, just like they supplemented their equine transport with trucks, but in 1945 the Wehrmacht was still mostly horse-drawn and bolt-action.

Jesse Kennett (l) and Don Kendall (r), the two explosion victims.

So, apparently black powder, or at least its substitute, can indeed kB the whole building. And then it can burn. For quite a while, if you have a whole plant full of it.

Craig Sanborn had a plant full of it, in Colebrook, NH on the Canadian border. He was away at the NRA annual convention in Charlotte, NC, when his plant blew up on 14 May 2010. Two workers were killed, and a third, David Oldham, seriously injured. Now Sanborn is on trial for their deaths, charged with manslaughter and negligent homicide. Prosecutors says he operated the plant in a reckless manner.

The two victims, 56-year-old Donald Kendall, of Colebrook, and 49-year-old Jesse Kennett, of Stratford, were hired just a month before the blast on May 14, 2010, at Sanborn’s Black Mag gunpowder plant in Colebrook.

Who knew that Thomas Crapper’s eponymous invention could turn on mankind? But one of them, in New York, turned on a meek and mild IT guy who now has a phobia about flushing — at least, according to his attorney Saul Goodman Sanford Rubenstein, who’s helping him cash in \ \ \ cope with the trauma \ \ \ sue for damages:

[The] toilet exploded in his face after he pulled the handle to test the water pressure in his Brooklyn apartment.

Michel Pierre sustained shrapnel wounds from flying shards of porcelain that pierced his face, arms and legs, and required 30 stitches, his lawyer told AFP.

The 58-year-old information technology specialist is now so fearful that he uses a rope to flush the toilet from behind the bathroom door at a safe distance.

“Those fears are part of his damages,” said his lawyer Sanford Rubenstein. “Clearly toilets are supposed to flush,

War crime? Probably. Result of a ‘sniping competition’? Maybe not.

Here’s an example of the sort of extreme claim we mean, coming from a British doctor with ties to the Establishment:

As women and children cross through the unnamed city where he [Dr David Nott] was stationed, they would be shot by snipers – and their wounds followed disturbing patterns,

‘From the first patients that came in in the morning, you could almost tell what you would see for the rest of the day. It was a game,’ he told The Times.

‘One day it would be shots to the groin. The next, it would only be the left chest. The day after, we would see no chest wounds; they were all neck [wound

“Gun County?” That could be Horry County, South Carolina, as gun manufacturers driven out of the Northeast by hostile politicians are convinced by the county’s package: country living with Myrtle Beach’s great recreation nearby, two technical schools producing able workers, pro-gun politicians statewide and, not least,  financial incentives.

The losing states tend to think it’s all about the financial incentives, but states like New York and Connecticut can match and exceed South Carolina’s incentives. It’s just that up north, having the state’s Governor and Senators vilify you and slander your management and workers is part of the whole package. And people don’t like being vilified — imagine that.

The latest new entrant in Horry County is Ithaca Gun Company, which operated in New York from 1880 to 2006, through several ownerships and overhauls, and then relocated to Ohio, where all Ithaca guns (and new models) were re-engineered for modern CNC production methods. The second Ohio owner is expanding the company to Horry County.

Ithaca proudly announced on its website that it expects to invest $6.7 million in capital, construct a 20,000 square foot plant, and create 120 jobs in Horry County’s Cool Sprin

So, tonight we celebrate Kid’s birfday, and he has requested a fire in the firepit. So we’ve secured our seasonal burn permit, and will dig out some of the ash and throw it in the sink holes we’ve been filling on the north side, and get rid of a lot of the ancient firewood — and the carpenter ants that dwell within.

Somewhere, a sensitive PETA-type person will feel a great disturbance in the Force, to wit, the anguish and terror of ten-thousand six-legged pests expiring at once in a small-h holocaust, and be saddened.

We’ll just try not to let the marshmallows melt off the sticks.

Back at you with more gun content tomorrow morning.

The Matinee was up on time, the TW3 (this!) a day late, and otherwise we hit most of our milestones… we’re also ahead of the power curve for the coming week with some really good content for you.

No, we’re not going to get all conceited about this. But we’re happy with our performance, although we always welcome criticism.

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

This week we remained close to the historical mean on words, at roughly 17,000 words, generally the same as last week, and we loaded 26 posts (and prepared two more that are not yet live, of which more below). The mean post was a little shorter: (640 versus last week’s 760 and the previous week’s 800). We continued to exceed our target of 19 posts (3x day x6 days +1 on Sunday). Comments were a decent 81.

We continie to be grateful to everyone that comments, links us, or even calls us names. That w

The victims, one supposes, think the situation blows. But the police have a collection of suspects, one or more of whom apparently did.

NEWARK  — A 13-year-old boy was the latest target of blow dart assaults in Newark.

The latest report was filed Wednesday evening after the victim reported being shot at with a blow dart from a passing vehicle around 6 p.m. on the 200 block of East Main Street.

According to a police report from the incident, the teen said a red Chevrolet drove by him on East Main Street and the blow dart came from the vehicle.

Kenneth Gantt, the 13-year-old boy who was targeted, said while riding along the street on his bike, he heard a pop and looked down and saw a dart, which got caught on his pants but didn’t pierce his skin.

“I didn’t know what was on it,” he said. “I wasn’t sure if I could die from it.”

Gantt said he spotted where the vehicle pulled into a business and was able to obtain the license plate and report it to the police.

Sgt. Paul Davis said the ve

21 Brothers is a different kind of World War I movie. It’s different because it’s Canadian and tells a story of a Canadian unit; because it’s very low budget, and because of its single-camera, single-take high concept.

We’re not sure that the producer and director weren’t making a virtue of budgetary necessity, but the movie appears to be shot as a documentary. At first, the fourth wall is almost broken as the actors speak to the “documentary cameraman” but in time they ignore him (he is never on screen and does not speak). But in fact, the entire film was shot in one take by that one camera. This gives the film something of a stage-play air, but it also allows a certain unexpected realism — you lose a few seconds adjusting to the light, for example, when action moves into or out of a dugout. On the other hand, the verisimilitude is shaken a tad by the “documentarian” having ability to film with color and sound, technical advantages that were decades ahead in 1916.

It was a clever idea. It’s