Weapons Man

Saturday was Crazy Day. Blogbrother’s schedule meant he was available only intermittently, and the weather was bad for it — too windy — but we were committed to prime most of the rest of the empennage parts. It went like this:

Somebody doesn’t know “stick a fork in her,” is just an expression. People do get testy about chow, especially in gourmand circles, but this is ridiculous:

Now, if this were a courtroom drama, somebody would say, “Counsel asserts facts which are not in evidence.” Because the Iraqis, yes, their leadership (especially at political level) sucks. But so does ISIL’s. They’re winning not because their Joes Jamals are better, or because their leaders are better, but because they (1) know what they’re fighting for and (2) have support.

Here are some tools we use on the airplane project in lieu of the usual tools for that purpose. We’ll probably elaborate on that at the Van’s Air Force Forum, where people building these planes hang out, but we thought that these are odd enough and in most cases versatile enough that gunsmiths, sport shooters, and even home handymen will find them useful.

We’ll cover the usual subjects: Guns, Usage and Employment, Cops ‘n’ Crims, Unconventional (and current) Warfare, and Lord Love a Duck!

A 1960s or 70s Land Rover Series II

This photo is from an unusual accident. The usual one involves a train and a pedestrian. It doesn’t hurt the locomotive.

Can you say TSA? We knew you could. We haven’t beaten on them since they advertised on pizza boxes for future traveler-gropers last month. (What’s next, Thunderbird bottles?)

As we have expected to happen for some time, and as the initial Cody Wilson “Liberator” first demonstrated, 3D-printed firearms made of common addititive-manufacturing plastics like ABS or PLA inevitably had to diverge from common steel firearms practice to take advantage of those plastics’ strength — and overcome their weaknesses.

We regret to use a news slot on this nearly-routine information, but we have to put it up while it still has some news value.  – the Eds.

According to prosecutors, four men beat and kicked three others unconscious the other weekend. The beatdown began when one of the victims, Laura Gaarsland, told one of the attackers he was “a bad person.” He proceeded to prove how good he wasn’t, by assaulting her, and his friends joined in. Gaarsland’s husband Joey intervened, and that got him the most vicious beatdown of all. A Good Samaritan also wound up joining the Gaarslands in being kicked while unconscious.  The first story:

John Lehman, Reagan-era SecNav of 600-ship-Navy fame, answers the question in the title in the affirmative. The great admiral in question is Adm. John Richardson, who just began a term as the Navy’s nuclear czar. The President has interrupted that 8-year term by naming him Chief of Naval Operations. It’s the top job, but his old job is as, if not more, important.

Last time we looked at suppressor legality, it was up to 37 of the 50 United States. (They’re banned in DC and all the Territories if memory serves).

There are some military blogs that have been around for a long time. One of the first we recall reading was CDR Salamander — a man in the long tradition of writing Naval officers. Before there were blogs, a military person separated from the service either had to find kindred souls locally, or subscribe to things that were printed on the pulp of dead trees.  During our short interregnum between active duty and finding a Reserve SF unit, we kept in touch with the military by joining organizations, and when it came time to join the Association of the US Army we jumped ship and joined the US Naval Institute instead. The reasons were simple: the swabbies could write. Our guys couldn’t. USNI’s Proceedings is stuffed with thought-provoking ideas expressed with verve, whereas Army was, in those days, as informative and lively as a gathering of Soviet agronomists celebrating the overfulfillment of the latest 5-year plan. (We don’t know...

First, there was a safety net. Enough food so widows and orphans could survive. A roof over your head.

This slide was prepared as a support slide for “Hondo” Geurts’s presentation on SOF acquisition (.pdf) at last week’s SOFIC. We don’t believe he actually used it, but it essentially illustrates the multifaceted procurement riddle:

Everybody screws up. Almost everybody gets away with it. Here’s what happened to a guy who developed complacent gun-handling habits, and “got away with it” only thanks to blind luck in the bullet’s placement, that left him with neither fatal (if he’d hit the femoral artery) or crippling (femur and/or patella [kneecap]) wounds. We don’t have his name, so we’ll call him ND Guy.

There seems to be a general assumption that the police, legislators, and other government authorities understand the law, for example, the law of freedom of speech and its very few, very narrow (and generally, shrinking) exceptions.

It was just a van, just an old Animal Control department van in an Ohio county, sold, probably in an insider dope-deal, with two guns inside it by mistake. The purchaser found the guns and returned them, and that’s where the whole thing stayed, until a local gadfly who asked, “What if the van had been sold to just anybody?” stirred up enough stink to get the Animal Control director suspended.

The human being is inherently fragile.