Weapons Man

In a perfect example of a fading celebrity’s desperate dying grasps at fame, Geraldo (née Jerry Rivera; the Jewish-Puerto Rican all-American mutt was renamed early in his career by a producer looking for an ethnic bean to count) has been tweeting S2 lately.

In the late 1950s, the Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice — the former Army agency that was spun off in the anti-gun Clinton years as a non-profit, and is now the Civilian Marksmanship Program, or CMP — sold a trickle of M1 rifles to lottery winners — or, since it was a government agency, to politically connected men who were able to jump the line.

Just decompressin’, or daycompressin’, here, recovering from a deep dive into the People’s Republic of Massachusetts yesterday. Two of them, actually; we slipped through the border on I-95 twice. We noted that they have long since taken down the Dukakis-era signs noting that possession of a firearm is treated more seriously than murder in MA courts, but they haven’t changed the legal environment.

Words fail. The victim of this freak accident in a Michigan lakeside town was only four years old.

Mikayla Rae VanderLaan died at approximately 12:40 p.m. Tuesday, said Capt. Mark Bennett of the Ottawa County Sheriff’s Department.

The girl was found alone in her bedroom at the family’s home on Sunset Place in the River Haven Village Mobile Home Park at about 6:30 p.m. Sunday. The girl’s mother and stepfather found her unresponsive and called 911, WZZM-TV reported.

“The investigation into this incident is ongoing,” Bennett said after announcing the girl’s death. “However, at this point, it does appear that the 4-year-old may have become entangled in clothing that was hanging from the back of a bedroom door. This may have occurred while the youngster was standing on a toy trying to reach an item up high.”

via Police: Girl, 4, dies after becoming ‘entangled’ | Grand Haven Tribune.

Accidents happen. Tragedies happen. You can’t bring back the dead, and you can’t prevent these from happening. You can only mourn them.

Considering this one, our usual snarkasm has deserted us, and we’ve really got nothing else to say about it, except this, our hearts go out to the family.

In an absolute what-is-this doing here release, [NAME] in The Atlantic makes a serious attempt to understand the Americans, Britons, and other Westerners who’ve flocked to ISIL. By “Westerners,” of course, we mean the real Westerners, not the cuckoo’s eggs like Abdulazeez, the Charlotte murder, or the Tsarnayevs, the Boston Marathon bombers. And his most interesting finding? That the down-and-outers who flock to the black flag are the same exact malformed personality types that flocked to the red flag in previous generations. (That’s the bit that shocking in a contemporary liberal magazine).

We keep seeing vintage flamethrowers come up at auction — they’re interesting weapons, and not being firearms they’re completely unconstrained by Federal or State law, except for two non-fun-loving jurisdictions that ban them, California and Maryland. (How could the legislators of MA, NJ and NY have missed this? Well, they’re totalitarians, but nobody ever said they were competent totalitarians. They tend to be the dissipated nephews of competent totalitarians past, these days). But anyway, these vintage flamethrowers always get bid up to nosebleed territory.

As long-time readers know, Tour d’Horizon is French for Clearing the Tabs. KWe’ll cover the usual subjects: Guns, Usage and Employment, Cops ‘n’ Crims, Unconventional (and current) Warfare, and Lord Love a Duck!

Our position on the current “transgendered” publicity campaign hasn’t changed: if you decide you’re Jesus, they put you in the room with Neoprene wallpaper, but if you decide you’re Janet,  they try to alter the world to comport to your delusion. Both of these reactions can’t be right, and it’s our opinion that this is just a phase the press and Hollywood are going through on the way to where they really want to be — call it the “full-NAMBLA.”

The point of thrill rides is to scare riders half to death. But this one in California (where lots of guns already are outlawed) went the whole way. The victim was a 31-year-old married woman and former Navy signals intelligence veteran.

A gun-owner-hating doctor at the Philadelphia (where else?) Veterans Affairs Medical Center made his personal gun-control point a little bluntly. When he saw someone had posted the old comment on Facebook, “I am all for gun control. If there is a gun in the room, I want to be in control of it.” Dr Greg Gorton’s snappy comeback?

We have an entire safe full of 5.56mm ARs (well, there’s also an old AR-10 in there) along with the safe of other stuff. But for a lot of people one AR is a major investment, and any more than that take food off the table or otherwise crimp the family budget more than practicable. If you could only have one service rifle, what would it be?

Recently, we expressed our dismay that the Administration has offered the release of traitor and spy Jonathan Pollard as a consolation prize to the Israelis, for getting Tel Aviv nuked at some future date, which is the intended outcome of his Iran deal. (Intended, at least, by the Iranians, who are not being subtle or dissembling about their intentions, at least, by Iranian standards of dissembling, which are at variance with those of the civilized world).

Even the most innocent of things can punch your ticket, as this Canadian country singer and his Australian girlfriend could tell you, if only they could tell you.

What do most of the world’s terrorists have in common? The FBI confesses complete and utter puzzlement.

Well, that’s going to make conducting our planned M203 class hard impossible. The ATF, pushing the limits of what can be done with a stroke of the pen, is declaring previously approved illumination and training-practice rounds (the orange chalk marking rounds) to be “explosives”. They’re following this up with trips out to individuals to confiscate the ammunition for their approved, stamped Destructive Device 40mm launchers, unless the owner happens to have an explosives license and an ATF-approved bunker.

What’s that? It sounds like a ham callsign? And we think that’s what N6CC.com stands for, although the site breaks it out as Navy 6 Combat Coms. But what we were flagged to was the site author, Tim Sammons’s, stories of his service in the Navy on a forgotten class of small combatants, the Trumpy class PTF patrol boats. The boats were American-made licensed copies of the Norwegian Nasty class boats that were used by the maritime operations wing of SOG in the Vietnam War. Tim has great stories of the Trumpys he knew, PTF-17, -18, and -19, boats that resembled in style, construction and size the classic Elco PT boats of World War II.

Mr Bison says, “It takes a special kind of stupid to crowd me, and then turn your back on me.”

The NTSB and Air Force are investigating a 7 July midair between an F-16CM Viper and a Cessna 150. Two aboard the Cessna died, the fighter pilot was uninjured, both planes were destroyed.

Somewhere, a cynical Devil Dog is saying that this is just to take a pound off so that maybe a female Marine can pass IOC one of these days. But the Marines are finally joining the Army in preferring the M4 to theM16 for infantry units.

We like to pride ourselves on our gun knowledge, but we know there are things that we don’t know at all well. Some of these things we know we don’t know, like fine double sporting shotguns. (The scary bit is, as Don Rumsfeld knew, not the stuff you know that you don’t know, but the stuff that you don’t even know that you don’t know).