Weapons Man

In 99 repeating 9% of gun barrels, the caliber is what it is, and the bullet that comes out of the barrel is the same diameter it always was, just marked by the rifling. Likewise, the rifling twist is what it is, and from the point where is picks up in the leade (forward of the chamber) to the point where the bullet exits the barrel it is constant.

Many are celebrating and enjoying a victory bask after the ATF retreated from its political partisan attempt to ban M855 “green-tip” ammunition.

We continue to deal with a death in the family, not unexpected but still disruptive. We will make an effort to get one usable  post up per day until things are resolved. This isn’t that post.

Expressions of condolences aren’t necessary, but we appreciate the sentiment. Back with you soon.

If you followed that headline here looking for irony, you’re in the wrong place. Bill Sheldon died last week, and he’s being mourned by everyone that knew him, and by a lot of people who wish they did.

Due to a family emergency, we’re going to be in travel, busy, then travel mode for approximately 10 days. We’ll try to maintain the posting schedule (4x weekday, 5x Saturday, 1x Sunday) but we expect that reductions are going to be a fact of life.

We’re pulling an all-nighter tonight with bills and tax paperwork. How much fun is that? Short answer: less than it was thirty years ago.

There’s a very large number of people that have offered links, ideas and even parts for builds in the comments or via email over the last few months, and if we get some downtime on this trip we hope to contact you, to thank you if nothing else.

We’re also trying to help a plan come together so a dad can surprise his son on a big day. Nothing to do with the family problem, but we’re touched that someone reached out for us to find just the right firearm for the occasion, and we take great joy in putting seller, buyer/dad and recipient/kid together. We’ll write about it afterwards.

The Nuremberg Defense did not avail the Nuremberg defendants, but it turns out it does have a use. A Park Forest, Illinois policeman, one Officer Taylor, used the Nuremberg defense: “I was just following orders!” to escape responsibility for one of the most irresponsible, tactically inept and cowardly police uses of force we’ve ever heard of.

If you study enough crimes, you will soon stumble upon the essential chicken-or-egg primacy problem of criminology: are criminals stupid because they’re drug users, or are they drug users because they’re stupid? If the dopes-on-dope amplifier effect is allowed to run in unconstrained feedback for a few generations, what happens?

Sometimes, it’s hard for the youth of today to get their heads around the degree of criminality of the 20th century Nazi and Soviet empires. The quote in the headline of this post was uttered to me by one such young person. He just couldn’t believe that the Nazis would kill their own people for listening to the wrong radio program. But in fact, they did.

Jimmy Stewart was known to generations of American movie-goers as a good guy. He seldom if ever played a villain; he usually played a good guy, the Western sheriff or marshal, or the Everyman thrust into a tough situation. Unlike many of his Hollywood peers, whose names came from the forebrains of producers and directors, his real name was Jimmy Stewart. He’s probably best remembered today for a movie that bombed on release — It’s a Wonderful Life, for which he was nominated for an Oscar, but which drove Frank Capra’s studio into bankruptcy. It became a television staple of Christmases in the United States thanks to the copyright having lapsed, either due to an error by studio clerks, or the dissolution of Capra’s firm (we’re not sure which).

This event happened last year, but we just heard about it (Baby Duck World, right? “It’s new to us”) and we were totally tickled by a news story about it, which has more facts and images.

First, they celebrated the New Year by blowing the whole apartment up, to the point where that whole end of the building had to be condemned until the roof and walls could be engineered back into proximity of one another.

In Smith’s The History of Military Small Arms, the author claims to see a  parallel between the introduction of the Dreyse Needle Gun and the history of military small arms in general. To wit:

We’ve meant before to write up1 one of the most interesting guns in history, the Benelli B76. It turns out that the fairly rare, and incredibly high-quality, Benelli B76, a single-stack double-action 9mm that hit the market right when the market started demanding double-stackers, had a number of rare variants that we’d never even heard of. And a guy has put his collection2, and a full explanation, on Imgur for our benefit. (Take a good look at the one in the lower right corner — it’s not a B76, and it’s not the same frame size as the rare target pistols).

Here are some goings-on going on, many of which come from the Volokh Conspiracy blog, which you should be reading.

We could make some wise-ass remark about “women drivers!” or “bat-guano crazy,” but in this case the news story pretty much speaks for itself.

The 3rd Amendment to the US Constitution is the least-developed of the Bill of Rights: responding to the quaint Georgian custom of hijacking the most appealing Georgian homes for the comfort of King George III’s officers and men, it forbade that practice. (It has not always been so honored; consider what happened to Robert E. Lee’s plantation). But a group of law scholars met recently at the University of Tennessee for a symposium on the forgotten amendment, and it’s possible we may see 3rd Amendment claims raised in court as a check on various types of government intrusions soon. A fascinating column by Tennessee law professor (and Instapundit blogger) Glenn Reynolds describes some of this issues:

A casual look at this Taurus Judge (or similar) might make you think that Bubba the Gunsmith has been gunsmiting [stet] again. But it turns out there’s a reason for this being so smitten: read on, after casting eyes on the Bubbalicious product.

We’ve finally had two or three days above freezing… two of them in a row, even. And yeah, the record snowfall has indeed produced one roof leak here. $#^!!

But the sun is expected to shine, off and on, today, and we’re expecting to enjoy several days in the forties this week. Hmmm… where’s the dusty, neglected range bag?

It’s 1951, in the first hard years of the Cold War, and for a select group of American young men, the sky is calling. The Air Cadet program was created in the throes of the runup to World War II when the US needed to produce lots of airmen, fast. A systematized training scheme put men through a boot-camp-like military indoctrination, followed by Primary, Basic and Advanced flight training. (Would-be airmen who couldn’t keep up or lacked pilot aptitude joined other cadets in training for other aircrew positions). By 1951 this relatively baroque system had been greatly simplified. Pilots were trained ab initio in T-6 piston planes (which had been the Advanced single-engine trainers in the wartime system). Then, pilots selected for multi-engine training would move on to the TB-25; pilots with fighter aspirations would move to the then-new T-33, a trainer version of the then-current Lockheed F-80 fighter.