Weapons Man

Yeah, uh, when we sat down at this computer we were going to write a quick Sunday post.

But we had a movie review, overdue from yesterday (and a production, actually, recommended by one of our commenters, so thank you, belatedly). And this happened and that happened and there was a plane building session and a grocery run and an exercise bike to fix and…

Well, it’s not as if we’d have said anything profound in this post if it had been up on time first thing in the morning, n’est-ce pas? 

It’s Sunday, the Lord’s Day. Noon will have to do.

The practice of posting That Was The Week That Was, an overview of the recently ended week, has tapered off here, as this kind of admin post is one of the least exciting to do. However, it’s a great way to call retroactive attention down on posts that might have been missed.

(DVD image) Berlin. 1940. Five 20-year-old friends enjoy a last time together before the currents of the century separate them: solid, practical Wilhelm is a 2nd lieutenant in the army, and leaves in the morning for his duty station in the East. Charlotte, “Charly,” is a freshly qualified nurse, and she can’t bring herself to tell Wilhelm she has fallen for him. Wilhelm, for his part, doesn’t want to make any promises — there’s a war on, and it wouldn’t be fair. Wilhelm’s younger Friedhelm is completely unpractical: he’s lost in words and poetry, and is dead-set against the war but he’s now a draftee, and their parents have made Wilhelm promise to keep him alive. Greta dreams of being a successful singer, but she has a problem: her boyfriend, Viktor, the fifth of the friends, and a son of a World War I soldier, is a Jew.

YouTube is a great place to look for proof of the proposition that half of everybody is below average. Here’s a screenshot of some of the people who don’t know that you Never Go Full Retard®.

On this lovely weekend day, as a light snow sprinkles on us in seacoast New Hampshire (Dear God, winter can end any time), we settle in to spend some quality time with our favorite (in entertainment terms)  gunsmith, Bubba. If you’re a habitué of Reddit’s /r/guns, you probably caught this beauty last week, but if not, here it is in all its… glory. It is stunning, for some values of “stunning.”

At Rock Island Auctions (their online auctions require a second registration at GunAuctionOnline.com).

Yeah, we could have posted about this earlier. There’s some really cool stuff there. There ought to be — there are 1,133 items in about 800 lots, some of which contain multiple guns.

Rather than do a more general Friday Tour d’Horizon, we thought we’d zero in today on various ways that various federal agencies are screwing up.

Well, you could ask Marco Dorfsman (amusingly called Draftsman in one place in the story — Damn You Autocorrect!), and he could tell you.

On 24 March, no doubt in response to the hyperventilating around the more suspicious end of the libertarian blogosphere, the US Army Special Operations Command issued a press release about exercise JADE HELM 15.

How a blogger, an FFL, a dad and a grand-dad ganged up across the nation to show a Boy Scout a Good Deed of the Day. Now, the Story Can Be Told, as a Hollywood narrator might say.

Anti-gun activists often argue that the “widespread availability of handguns,” is what is responsible for the nation’s suicide rate.

Funny thing: people intent on suicide seem to be able to do it, whether they have a handgun or not. So nations that have much higher suicide rates than the USA have very strict gun laws. And then, there’s this:

This is not the first such case by any means. EgyptAir 990 (1999, 216 murdered), SilkAir 185 (1997, 103 murdered), LAM 470 (2013, 32 murdered), there are at least three others and nearly 700 dead just in the last couple decades.

At least some selfish poor fool shoots himself, he only kills himself. This fool killed 149 other people, too! But, he did it without a gun, and if you’re Michael Bloomberg, that’s probably a lot better.

On a range we know well, the two Boston Marathon bombers, the late and unlamented Tamerlan “Speedbump” Tsarnaev, and his brother Dzhokar “Flashbang” Tsarnaev, went shooting just two years ago, a few weeks before committing mass murder, according to evidence revealed in the trial of Flashbang. The Feds have posted a .pdf of their range sign-in sheets.

Serial Number A00261, made in beautiful downtown Pasadena sometime around 1973, at a guess.

The only surprise in this is not that the evidence supported charging the little crapweasel with desertion, but that anybody in the Administration, dedicated as it is to “different spanks for different ranks,” was willing to sign off on the charges.

A frustrated Dad wanted his local cops to act like this towards his disobedient kid. The cops, sensibly, decided they wouldn’t. (The cartoon appears to be from a prison publication. No surprise that criminals have this view of cops).

In his entertaining narrative of the early US Space Program, The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe writes that, while The Right Stuff couldn’t be precisely defined, you knew who had it — and who lost it. “It could blow at any seam,” Wolfe wrote.

Strategika is a new-ish policy magazine published by the center-right Hoover Institution on, well, strategy.

It’s an hour drive (hey, you Westerners, before you start telling us how far away your range is, remember we’re in New Hampster, where everything is in everything else’s pocket, and the map usually has a call-out for the NH line, like all the other snack-sized states in the Northeast.

Trying out a new range. It’s an hour plus away, but it’s supposed to be good. Kid and I have three objectives, well four objectives:

1. Check it out. Do we want to join?
2. Test fire the lower that he built. Does it function with live ammo?
3. Test fire the Afghan build M4 and maybe zero the iron sights.
4. Blast away with an M9 for sheer shits and grins.

Talk at you later.