Weapons Man

OK, Frank Goepfert/Midwest Tactical moves a lot of Class III weapons, including a lot of the ugly ducklings that Frank seems to get into the hands of the guys who think they’re swans. But sometimes he has a Title 1 firearm that just defies description. Here is a Mauser rifle that has been ministered to by the Dread Gunsmite Himself, Bubba:

Thinking of a dead friend got us digressing on some of the more formal ways we, as humans, have celebrated and mourned the lives and deaths of our fellows. One way is by creating a funeral march, which talented people have been doing for at least 300 years. Here are a few of our favorites, followed by a non-funeral-march death-inspired classical piece, in roughly chronological order.

The media want us to have a “national conversation on guns” every time some kid whacks himself with a .45, and suggests that the proper response to homicide or suicide is disarming tens of thousands or millions of people who didn’t do it.

Often tagged with “Fast and Furious,” the ATF’s multiple efforts to walk guns to Mexican drug trafficking organizations during the 2000s, notably to the Sinaloa Cartel favored by both the Bush and Obama Administrations over the rival Zetas or the Mexican government, was a multi-operation hydra involving tens of ATF field offices, hundreds of agents, and somewhere between thousands and tens of thousands of firearms — there has never been a full accounting, and ATF resists it to this day.

Here’s an interesting photograph from an article by correspondent Joe Thorpe in Nigeria. These guys are apparently a Nigerian strike force trained by an international team of contractors. They are working on MOUT or building clearing, as you can see — each scanning his sector high or low as he is tasked. But what are the Colt or clone carbines that are carrying.

Behold, what ascends the flagstaff of the Fort Harrison Veteran’s Administration Medical Center in Helena, Montana these days (or at least back in June, GLBTQWERTY Pride Month):

Well, there was the boat, and the drinking. we probably shouldn’t understate the drinking.

Here you have it, by the unsound minds and alcohol-sodden bodies of the Article 15 Clothing crew. Coming from them, you know it’s kinda NSFW.

Of course, coming from them it’s funny as all hell.

Hat tip, Miguel at GunFreeZone.

From the WeaponsMan.com collection: ballistic knife.

This may not be helping as much as they think, but what else are they going to do? Assailed on several fronts over the G36 overheating problem, HK has struggled to get its message out against the jeers of the press and the barrage of complaints, both official and leaked, from the Ministry of Defense.

Didn’t we just have a hammer homicide yesterday? Why, yes, we did. But let it never be said that the American criminal class has an unnatural fear of repetition: here’s another! Although to be sure, yesterday we had one murder carried out by at least two dudes, today we have two murders attempted (without complete success) by one dude. Squinty Dude here on the right has tried just about every strategy that has any hope of getting him to walk, his attorney having deployed just about everything except the Bitch Had It Coming® defense, including the ever-popular Despite My Client’s Efforts, The Victims Lived, So What’s The Big Deal?™ defense.

The Air Force brings the FOOM with conventional precision delivery of dumb bombs on a tight island bombing range, from a 53 year old B-52 (B-52s still flying date to 1962).

The Firearm Blog is reporting that Germany has moved to purchase a limited quantity of HK417s and machine guns to replace 1200 G36s for troops rotating into combat zones, in light of the G36’s problematic performance when hot (either through firing or in ambient conditions of high heat). They provide what appears to be a machine translation of a German newspaper article. A number of people with weak reading comprehension have posted on places like HKPro that “Germany adoped the 417 to replace the G36.” Not so schnell, Sparky; what Germany did (and what TFB seems to have reported) is buy a small quantity of 417s (and a similar quantity of 5.56 light machine guns) to give its deployed troops some improved small arms capabilities. That’s all.

The AP missed the lede of a recent story: one of the biggest contributors to an explosion of homicides in Missouri is, indirectly, the state’s network of Victim Disarmament Zones, often misleadingly called Gun-Free Zones (the Zones are only “free” of legally carried gunsl; they don’t alter criminal behavior). Missouri’s robust criminal networks, formal and informal, have put the word out that the parking lot outside a school, court, stadium or other VDZ is an excellent place to go trolling for guns.

Jimmy the Hammer Rodgers (left), the hammer guy, and Wayne Wright (right), the supposed friend.

These two somewhat similar sets of rules were developed by two different leading fighter pilots in World War I. While they apply particularly to the air combat of the area, they are also, to one extent or another, guides to principles of combat and of warfare that are useful to all warriors at all times.

This time, they killed the guy. No, not the guy they were shooting at — he’s in stable condition, and going to recover fully. That’s the guy they should have killed, the guy who held a gun to a cop’s head and later turned and pointed it at him. (The gun turned out to be an Airsoft fake, but was convincing enough you have to agree with the decision to engage the suspect. We have an NYPD official photo of the suspect “gun” below).

Have you ever seen an animal stretch? Of course you have. Dogs do it all the time; some of them do it every time they get up. Cats are even more athletic stretchers, which probably goes a long way to explain their prodigious jumping ability. (Our late cat, Khalid bin Mahfouz — named after a terror financier who escaped justice by expiring of natural causes — would periodically turn up on the kitchen rafters, some nine feet above the floor. Sure, he was jumping from the counter to the cabinets, but these were still amazing leaps).

This week was a busy one, with two of our Saturday posts (Matinee and this TW3) being posted late, and last week’s overdue Saturday posts never getting done at all.