Weapons Man

In our opinion, this one is. We’re not looking for a precision rifle that can say hello at 1,000+ meters — for one thing, there’s no place to shoot it to its potential in our corner of a state of smallholdings — but if you live in, say, Texas, Utah, or in the gun’s current home, Colorado, there’s a hell of a long-range rifle for sale at a reputable gun shop in Erie (North of Denver, East of Boulder, off I-25). Can you recognize a face from this close-up?

The cap of snow in the yard hasn’t melted a bit, but it’s about 40 inches lower. (It had gone all the way to cover the bare trunk of the arbor vitae that’s most beloved of the local deer; they’ve eaten everything they can reach, and the poor thing just has a bit of greenery above buck neck-stretch. The snow had been up to the green, and now it’s about 3 feet 4 inches lower). Some of the invisible undulations in the ground are now reflected, a little, and you can now see little humps where the stone walls lie.

Some of the sites describing this video describe it as a propaganda film. It is that, in the sense that it was produced by a wartime combatant (Britain) and meant to stir emotions in the citizens of a noncombatant (the USA, at that time). Accordingly, the movie shows some of the things you’d expect an American to believe about Canada and Canadians — the happy Inuit, the voluble French trappers.

What kind of knucklehead names his or her kid “Jeh?” Must definitely be a knucklehead to reckon with, considering what a knucklehead Jeh himself is. Does he have kids? We hope it shops there, because, like Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 8-to-1 decision famously said, “Three generations of imbeciles is enough.”

Sometimes, men die in war. Sometimes, their deaths are fast and clean, like that of a character in a 1950s Western. He’s reached the end of his character arc, so, “Ah! They got me!” and he crosses over to the other side, chest clutched. Or he just tumbles off the livery-stable roof, dropping his Winchester. (And as fake as the deaths in those entertainments were, at least they don’t “respawn,” like the dead in today’s video games).

H&K, having decided that we don’t suck and they don’t hate us after all, is trying to bring a semi-automatic version of their G 36 rifle to the United States and worldwide market. To do this they have to leap two regulatory hurdles: authority to export the firearm from the Bundeskriminalamt, the “Federal Criminal Office” that manages the Federal Republic’s stringent weapons export laws, and then authority to import the weapon to the US, from the payroll patriots at the ATF.

The yout’ is recovering from a bout of senseless gun violence in a Hispanic section of … Spain? Oh, wait, and it wasn’t gun violence. He actually got injured running with the bulls in Ciudad Rodrigo.

Daesh, or ISIL (ISIS if you’re one of the media guys egging them on sotto voce), only looks invincible when it’s up against the tissue-thin and cracker-brittle (and abandoned by its American mentors) Iraqi army, or when it’s shooting, slicing, or beheading women, children and other helpless captives. These inbreds, product of generation after generation of first-cousin marriage, seek not victory but death, and when their opponents, like the Kurdish YPG, are granted arms and reasonable competence, the performance of ISIL as combatants is pathetic in the field.

Here’s a recent (2013) presentation (.pdf) from an Armaments and Munitions Conference conducted under the auspices of the National Defense Industrial Association, which used to, in the shadows of time, be the American Defense Preparedness Association, and which was before that the Ordnance Association. NDIA conducts regular conferences on many subjects of interest to WeaponsMan.com readers, and their briefing slides — the military being, for good or for ill, a PowerPoint culture — are generally available to the public at the Defense Technical Information Center. Small Arms and SOF conferences may be of greatest interest, but there are gems in some of the others, like this Armament Conference.

And we’re not joking when we say everybody:

OK. Maybe we were joking. The fight’s a snowball fight; the fighters, Franciscan friars (monks) at a monastery in Jerusalem.

There’s been a lot of fights in Jerusalem, but this is one that could entertain anybody.

We’ve all seen this before: the Look. The Look of Bat Guano Crazy!

One gun jeep — looks dead butch, but needs work. (Starting/charging system has proven resistant to troubleshooting). Ian at Forgotten Weapons has reached that stage that all vintage-vehicle LTRs reach; he is so eager to be divorced from this 1946 CJ-2A Jeep (basically, a wartime Jeep with bigger headlights for the civilian market) that he’s throwing in the semi-auto 1919A4 and mount. Beats the hell out of the toaster oven they might throw in at the local Buy Here Pay Here.

We’ve seen several of the WarFairy designed 3D-printed AR lowers being put through their paces, but here’s something we weren’t expecting to achieve test-fire status so soon — the Deimos 3D-printed fire control group.

Hey, it’s just a Ka-Bar (on this day of edged weapons, which we’ve now added as a category). Just a Ka-Bar. Even if this one is a Camillus, these Marine knives are best known by the name of their original maker. They’re good, simple, sturdy, dependable and cheap field knives, much used in SF and other Army units as well as in their birthplace, the Corps. So what makes this one worth, says the auctioneer, $11k? (That’s the opening bid, for an auction opening in a few hours). It doesn’t look real special, does it?

Everyone knows that guns are dangerous, and if you’re careless with one, you can get your ticket (or someone else’s) punched, and wind up in front of a judge on a negligent homicide charge.

Well, with your life, liberty, and a big honkin’ knife?

We haven’t heard directly from GG or Defense Distributed or Cody Wilson, but he’s tweeting up a storm on the subject. (Not having heard is irritating, when he’s sitting on four figures of our money. But we’ve received only one of the updates supposedly sent to all hands since purchasing a GG).

Here’s a heartwarming story of a piece of human detritus who will be locked up for good… too late for the lives of at least five people, but you can’t expect efficiency out of the courts. They’re fully staffed by government workers, after all. The wire story from Wilkes-Barre, PA, reacting to the jury’s decision not to impose the death penalty:

Why are we not really shocked that the Beltway drone that the Beltway dredged up to continue mismanaging the Veterans Administration is a Stolen Valor character, specifically, a Special Forces poseur?