Weapons Man

Washington, October 1962. The President, Vice President, and key cabinet and General Staff members gather in the situation room during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

These tests have been on the net for a while, “a while” ranging from 3 months ago to a couple of days. We thought it would be a public service to collect them in a single post.

Consider, for instance, this lady:

So there they were, these construction workers, just minding their business… and FOOM! Three floors of a Bronx high school were wrecked, with one floor’s wall and windows blown into the skreet, and three workers inside near Ground Zero were more or less wrecked, too.

This remarkable documentary is an English dub of an episode of a Russian TV series. In English the series, which ran in the UK in the dubbed version, is called Soviet Storm, and this is episode 13.  (Fear not the language; while the charts and maps still appear in Russian, the narration is professionally rendered in native English). This episode deals with the sea war, which really means, essentially, the sub war. The video shows why: when the Soviets tried surface operations, the Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe cleaned their clock. So Stalin’s sailors took their war below the surface, at great risk, but also, to great effect.

Everyone knows you shouldn’t turn a nine-year-old (or several) loose with a submachine gun. Let alone several nine-year-olds.

Here’s one good, clean, wholesome alternative that’s fun for the whole family!

That’s the ticket. Crew drill develops physical strength, teamwork, and the most important kind of discipline kids can have, self-discipline.

Thanks to the commenter who tipped us to this, it really made our day.

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As is usually the case, the initial media reports were incomplete and incorrect. Today, we have more details on the incident. Rather than a counterattack by US Marines, it was a self-organized “pack, not a herd” of young men that disarmed and disabled the attacker, a known Islamic fundamentalist named Ayoub el-Qahzzani, 26.  (Sounds close enough to Ala-kazam! to us).

Here’s the situation: say, you want to test a new firearm or part design, and because you’re iterating rapidly, 3D printing would be ideal. But the mechanical properties of common 3DP polymers, polylactic acid (PLA) and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) are insufficient, and it’s either more challenging or more expensive to print in materials with better mechanical properties, like nylon.

We’ll cover the usual subjects: Guns, Usage and Employment, Cops ‘n’ Crims, Unconventional (and current) Warfare, and Lord Love a Duck! And maybe some other stuff, because whatever the hobgoblin of our little mind is, we can pretty much rule out consistency.

Does your county sheriff have 3 tons of food ratholed in his basement armory? How about blasting caps stored with the C-4? No? Well, has he got one of these?

This is a serial killing you probably didn’t hear about, because it didn’t go off with a bang, or, for that matter, three bangs.

It’s probably not fair to call this the work of Bubba the Gunsmith, because it was the work of professionals, turning what was then an awkward, ugly, unwanted military rifle in a weird caliber into something a hunter might reasonably take afield, and in the process, turning a bunch of ex-Soviet arms dumped by the Finnish Army, which had captured and tried to use them, into dollars — in this case, Canadian dollars.

We thought we’d mentioned this before. Maybe we did. The eponymous owner of Sturgeon’s House uses a photo of the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, who he most likely isn’t (the writer expired decades ago, although we’re told his 1954 More Than Human is still fresh).

In any event, the site is primarily a set of forums inhabited by some people you will recognize from around the serious gunosphere. There are forums for air, naval, strategy, archaic weapons, and of course, small arms. If you go there, a little exploration will tell you more than we can.

You will find more here than you will have time to read, if you’re remotely interested in the same stuff.

This is what a Phoenix does, right? Something like this?

We blame Stephen King for creating this plague of copycat Pennywise the Clowns from “It”.

They did it just about the way you’d expect the VA to. They just shredded the vets’ records. Including letters which “would have had an impact on the veterans’ claims” but that were sent right to the shredderizer without even being opened. Frankly, you couldn’t build an organization that screwed vets more than the VA if you gave the task to ISIL.

That means, keep your musket clean, powder dry, and hatchet scoured — and buy this 1851 Mountain Howitzer. If Johnny Reb comes marching up your driveway, give him a whiff of the grape!

If you’ve ever read H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (or saved some Time of your own and read the Classics Comic Book version, or the 1979 Marvel Classics version, which give you all the plot) you know the story of the Eloi and Morlocks, two species that populate Earth in 802,701 AD, long after the end of the human race.