Weapons Man

A common SF expression in our day was: “Big Boy Rules are in effect.”

We’ve covered the SIRT training pistol before, but such a successful market was probably not going to be neglected by Glock forever. In fact, Glock has introduced several versions of training pistol, most of which are available only to LE/military customers, so far. They can all take rail-mounted accessories or aftermarket sights without trouble.

So far: 26 shootings, 9 fatal, bringing the monthly count to 33. But the cops are giving the public what it wants. The people of Baltimore wanted less policing so badly they rioted over it, and now the shooters in all 26 shootings are still at large.

What’s more dangerous: the bat in her hand, or the bats in her belfry? Sam Campbell would probably say the bats in Haley Fox’s belfry… although she doesn’t swing a bad Louisville Slugger, either.

This short, I Fought For You, has been around for over five years, so you might have seen it already. It was put together by three upstate New Yorkers, Andrew Marzano (director), Josh Pies (script) and Dave Bode (score). It’s a little over the top — we can just see Nick Palmisciano making fun of the salute — and it’s based on the usual confusion over Veterans’ Day (for us live ones) and Memorial Day (for the dead ones) but their hearts are in the right place.

Of course, we’ve remarked before that for centuries a service main arm have all been clustered around a fairly consistent size and weight, even as utility, range, firepower have undergone revolution after revolution; likewise, practical pistols cluster around a fairly consistent size and weight. There’s no real reason that a Glock 17 would be close in dimensions to a S&W Model 10 .38  and in turn to a Colt Navy .36 cap-and-ball revolver, unless that was a pretty practical size.

Many things get salvaged around here. Airplane parts we riveted wrong. (Oops. On the plus side, we’re getting real good at drilling out rivets). Various bits of metals or plastics that might get reused creatively. All kinds of things.

Heck, we’re humans, and so even as our organisms salvage their own timed-out or wrecked cells, we salvage ourselves when we’ve gotten messed up.

Well, we get help, sometimes.

Anyway, today is kind of a salvage day. We do (finally!) have a Saturday Matinee to put up; it’ll be backdated to yesterday. We have a couple of partly finished ones we might complete and slot into the weeks that are missing theirs, also.

Yes, this isn’t our most inspired Sunday post ever. What can we say? Written at 0200, that’s why. It’ll get posted around dawn. Dawn’s when the French and Indians attack.

It probably should have been a warning to us that this film had not one, but three names. That’s never a good sign. In the US it was The Warriors (not to be confused with the 1979 low-budget reimagining of Xenophon’s Anabasis in a stylized, campy New York youth gang setting). In the UK it was Dark Avenger. And in production, it was The Black Prince. 

Kyle Stock (l) and Michael Bloomberg (r).

In the long-running serial of financial peril that is the Colt Defense story, a midnight discovery by commenter Daniel E. Watters:

There have been weapons since time immemorial that combine defensive and offensive capabilities. Think of a siege tower from the days of ancient and medieval warfare. It combined offensive capability (delivering infantry to a fortress wall) with defensive (keeping the slings and arrows of outrageous defenders off the infantry until the ramp dropped).

Sure enough, a few days after a gang shootout along comes the media with the other side of the story.

A child, a pool, a desperate attempt at CPR.

A key character in the Robin Moore novel, and John Wayne movie loosely based on it, The Green Berets, was Peterson, the Scrounger. It’s very clear even in the movie that in SF culture, a Scrounger was a capitalized title. Now, the movie has numerous Hollywood departures from the real world of SF service in Vietnam, but the novel and script were based on immersion in period SF culture. One of the numerous things it got right was the degree to which Group in general and a deployed ODA in particular valued a talented, inspired Scrounger.

We apologize for posting this one a little late. We think you’ll see why.

We’re familiar, here in the USA, with weapons that are shaped by US gun laws. We have a variety of weird and wonderful arms that exist only because of the Gun Control Act of 1968, the National Firearms Act of 1934, and the patchwork of implementing regulations and executive orders that have shaped the US market. In addition, state assault-weapon band have resulted in oddities like California’s “Bullet Buttons.” A wide range of legislatively-midwifed Frankenguns, from the Walther PPK/S, to short barreled rifles, to pistols with SIG braces, reflect the degree to which designers are constrained by the gun-designing impulses of American politicians and bureaucrats.

Quick, what do Nigerians eat? Well, in one recent case, the answer was: assorted other Nigerians. Those responsible are believed to have been arrested.

We have been around and around on this, but while we’re waiting for the 8 miserable recycled female survivors (and some dozens of their male peers) to reflow into the Camp Darby phase of Ranger Class 7-15 after bouncing out of 6-15, we have a few other relevant things, things we should have covered previously but haven’t.

OK, not gunsmithing here, but planesmithing. And something has been going wrong for a while, but we were too blind to see it.

One of the coolest things that you get with membership in the National Shooting Sports Foundation is access to the NSSF’s research. We’re looking over a survey that they conducted about hunting with AR-type Modern Sporting Rifles. While we can’t share the proprietary survey in its entirety, we can comment on a couple of the things that really struck us.