Weapons Man

There they were, excavating an old in-ground fuel tank. It seemed like a routine job for the two workers. And then… FOOM!

We’ve been saying this for years: a stolen valor case is never just a stolen valor case. It’s always a marker for a deeper seated pathology, for a complete lack of integrity. A few recent cases show just how wide-ranging the criminality of Stolen Valor punks can be.

Most service-weapon users (meaning, the organizations, more than the men) do a really lousy job of tracking how many rounds go through their weapons. This results in things like some of the crappy-shooting old rifles units have in their arms rooms, and also in a lot of money wasted overhauling guns that aren’t really due for it yet (because maintenance is done “on schedule”), or spending a fortune on periodic inspections (so that maintenance can be done “on condition”). The average line-unit armorer is a supply clerk, trained to rack and un-rack rifles and maintain accountability; he lacks the training and inspectional technology to determine when any firearm needs to be overhauled, absent a truly egregious problem.

“Officer, he looked like this, but with more anger and less clothing!”

What sort of kid throws a brick at a school bus?

We’ve reported in the past at great length on what we’ve called the Pistol OCD of the Pennsylvania State Police (link is to a Google search of Weaponsman for PSP stories, not all of which are pistol-problem-related). They’ve been through more pistol models and calibers in fewer years than any group of two or three statewide agencies you care to name, but they’re reporting a new problem with their new Sig 227 pistols.

45 years ago this week, ARVN (Army of the Republic of Viet Nam, South Vietnam) and American forces were fighting in Cambodia. Their objectives were to disrupt PAVN (People’s Army of Viet Nam, North Vietnam) sanctuaries and base areas inside the ostensibly neutral country, to set conditions for South Vietnamese security for a “decent interval” (Kissinger’s words) after US withdrawal, and, as what today’s Kickstarter kids would call a “stretch goal,” to seize the North Vietnamese headquarters for their invasion of South Vietnam, COSVN (the Central Office for South Viet Nam).

Is this a trick question? “Ah, tricksy is he, the Weaponsman. He’s tricksy!”

Shooting Sports Retailer wrote yesterday:

This poor guy had screwed up, so he went to jail.

Let’s begin with some numbers, to remind you of how this experiment is going so far. Bear in mind that these are not average women soldiers: they are among the Army’s boldest and most ambitious women. In many cases, their commanders and peers of both sexes consider them outstanding soldiers. Many of these women assess themselves as being the equals in fitness and strength of their male peers. Every one of these young ladies put herself in the arena, and that’s worth something. It doesn’t get them a Ranger tab, yet, but it gets them some respect.

Western Civilization’s best answer to the question in the title has been, since approximately the return of Marco Polo to Europe with this stuff, gunpowder: that is, a chemical reaction inside a confined space with a single outlet for the projectile, and the pressure. But that’s not the only answer. And there are reasons you might not wish to use gunpowder. Chemical propellants take some engineering to be safe, reliable, and capable of being stored (the fixed round of ammunition, holding and protecting the propellant in a sealed container capable of being weatherproofed, was a great leap forward in all these areas). Chemical propellants also have thermal, visual, and audible signatures that might be undesirable in some weapons applications.

Actually, we wanted to use a crude word beginning with “A,” after a girl we knew who was an A—— Magnet. But we didn’t, we used “Trouble.” And he is George Zimmerman, whom I think we all expected to retire to obscurity after he was tried for his self-defense shooting of young thug Trayvon Martin. George has not fulfilled that expectation in any way, shape or form: his latest advent into the headlines is not like his rather admirable foray into art (left). Nope: media are reporting he got shot in the face in a road rage incident. George’s wounds are not life-threatening. (Update: the round was fired at him, and entered the cabin of his truck, but missed; he was injured only by flying glass. George does not seem to have returned fire). 

Nope. Not 9mms. 911s. Like the one a Waterford, Virginia man turned into a missile in April in an exercise of, at the very least, staggeringly bad judgment.

The jihad-friendly, American-hating head of the fringe Green Party, Elizabeth May, stood up at a political roast… and clearly had been hitting the Judgment Juice® like a lumberjack twice her size. She wrapped up a rambling, incoherent and seemingly-endless speech with a squeee! aimed at her apparent crush, Omar Khadr: “Omar Khadr, you’ve got more class than the whole fucking cabinet!”

This classic old Colt Mustang .380, the original Colt knockoff of the Llama pocket-pistol knockoff of the 1911, has seen better days. Can it be saved? A customer brought it to a gunsmith who told the story on Reddit and Imgur (all these photos came from Imgur, and are linked in the Reddit thread).

The surfaces that are on our mind are those of the myriad parts of the RV-12’s tail feathers, which are now completely prepped, or very nearly so (hmmm… there may be some holes yet to be dimpled in the leading edge of the vertical stab skin).

While walking on city streets? Not a good idea.

Interesting story, in Politico of all places, by a policeman turned academic who has studied police shootings from an interesting angle: the psychological effects on the cops. There is not much literature about this, and a lot of it is sheer nonsense: for example, Goodman’s On Killing follows conventional pop-psychology wisdom in suggesting that police (or GIs) are broadly and deeply traumatized by the act of shooting another human being to death, and that the same psychological mechanisms that .

We continue to add to the map of Freedom’s enemies. There are over 350 nodes on the new map, and every one of them a proven, if not sworn, enemy of firearms freedom.