Weapons Man

Face and neck tattoos, freak-show hair, and that’s this creep’s normal side.

Just a brief note on this breaking news:

We’re way, way behind on this, because the company slipped it into their line at SHOT, promoted it heavily at SHOT, and is shipping several versions in quantity. This is the PTR-32 Generation II, of which, the company seems not to have good photos (Call Oleg Volk!)

… on a Century C308 FAL Clone. We are not making that up.

Ever sleep in and miss taking the trash out the day the garbage truck comes? Hey, it happens. But you cross over into being that guy when you then decide you can simply use your finely calibrated Norden Brainsight and hit the truck as it passes, with a long garbage bomb, out your window. That was where Manuel Erinna’s problems started, while lining up on the dumpster dragger from overhead:

The greatest t-shirt salesman in the long and bleak history of Marxism had a short and eventful career selling two products: revolution, which got a mixed reception, and himself, which was more of a success. Today, hundreds of thousands of ill-educated students who couldn’t pick his theories out of a lineup wear his glowering visage on their unwashed selves, much as they wear the similarly “hip” faces of similarly “hip” pop singers or actors. Indeed, Che’s brain-dead experimentation with guerrilla warfare wrote his doom in much the same way that, say, Kurt Cobain’s brain-dead self-medication with heroin or Brian Jones’s with the whole pharmacopeia wrote theirs. 

OK, so now you’re on the hunt: not for Wile E. Coyote, or anything like that, but for available M855 ammunition. The sudden shock has taken up most of the slack in America’s just-in-time ammo-distribution system.

As we have previously reported, XM 855 and other 5.56 mm ammunition that uses a steel core (in other words, anything designed with reference to the 1970s FN SS109 round), has been subjected to a ban, effective on 16 March 15.

Here’s Sumdood from National Geographic, asking that question: How many water balloons does it take to stop a bullet — a .44 Magnum from a Smith Model 629, to be specific?

If you’re enough of a gun nut to read this site regularly, you’ll be pretty close to the answer, having seen other instances of firing into water. (In fact, it’s how bullets are recovered in crime labs, for forensic ballistics). But you’ll seldom see it given so much of a reality-TV build-up, with the payoff coming in slow-motion video.

The key bit is the slo-mo at the end, where they’re showing the bullet speed in fps as it declerates through each balloon. After the second balloon, the mighty .44 Mag is down to airsoft levels of fps, and it only goes downhill from there.

So why don’t they use water balloons as armor? Well, the first shot lets all the water out, and nobody fires one shot at you these days. Plus, it’s about as heavy as armor gets.

Case in point: Navy vet Glenn Israel and his buddy, Marine vet Donnie Navidad, who were attending an Oakland Raiders game, when they faced a situation you can’t anticipate or train for. They spotted (Israel) and tried to catch (Navidad) a young girl who fell or jumped, she was so drunk she’s not sure, from a stadium balcony to the concrete below.

Some time ago we covered the types of Armor available to vehicle designers through World War II and explained why penetration of Rolled Homogeneous Armor, then state-of-the-art, is still routinely used as a standard measuring stick for armor penetration. But while RHA was the tank skin of choice in 1945 (with cast armor used for specific purposes, and face- (aka flame-) hardened armor on the way out), armor developments didn’t stand still then.

The ATF, under anti-gun national socialist Byron Todd Jones, was never expected to be a friend of legal gun owners. But in the dead of the night Friday the agency issued a unilateral ban on M855 “green tip” ammo. The ban is not effective for 30 days — until 16 March — but has already cleared 62 grain M855 ammo off wholesalers’ and retailers’ shelves.

Again. We got another 14″ or so of Global Warming dropped on our heads last night. Mind you, it could be worse: the Manor’s roof holds up fine, the plowman cleared the roads and the driveway, the cars and other ‘sheenry stand clean, warm and dry in garage and shed, the ‘lectricity still comes on in the wires, the water pipes have not burst, we’re toasty and warm inside. (We do regret reconfiguring the fireplace as Ye Doglet Bed, but that’s a sunk cost now, as the wood pile is somewhere under the permafrost). Life in the First World is still a fine thing.

This movie was based on a popular non-fiction book that hit the racks in the 1980s, one of several books about heroic Vietnam experiences that delighted the public, as a backlash took hold against the media-mythologized image of the no-good Vietnam vet. But “based on” gets tortured pretty badly between book and screen; IMDB calls it a “fact-based war drama,” and we all know what that means. Now, they didn’t make the protagonist a conflicted war criminal or anthing; in fact, most of the changes the writers (a team practically as big as Glenn Miller’s Band, judging from the credits, never a good sign) and director Peter Markle made, made their adventure story less interesting than the real adventured of USAF Lt. Col. Iceal Hambleton.

You know that, “Thin Blue Line of Silence”? The term that generally enrages the living daylights out of our cop friends, because (1) they’re absolutely ready to throw a crooked or out-of-control cop off the force, and (2) they also know that every complaint is investigated, no matter how frivolous. Despite the fact that cops often seem to be handled gently by internal investigations (kind of like the way the bar association acts as enabler for corrupt lawyers), Matt, a career officer, knew that in his department, an out-of-line deputy was a lot more likely to be stopped by a fellow deputy. He FOIA’d the statistics that he thought would prove that, as he said, “the ‘cops don’t rat on other cops’ line is nothing but hogwash.” Sure, he admits, that has happened at times, but he resents the hell out of the idea that all cops do it.

In 1959, a General Motors executive boasted that there were so many options available to buyers of the 1959 Chevrolet, that it was theoretically possible for no two of the hundreds of thousands of Chevies delivered that year to be alike. (In fact, many popular configurations were made in vast quantity, and many theoretical combinations of options made no practical sense and were never built). It’s quite a difference from today, when you have red, white, black, silver, and Option Package A or Option Package B. The new way of doing things substitutes soulless modern efficiency for funky 20th-Century soul.

Open wide!

Last year we saw several developments that hinted that 3-D printing was coming in metals. Of course metal 3-D printing is fairly common now, using various modes of laser sintering, but the promise of 2014 was that consumer level (or at least prosumer) 3D printing in structural metals was a possibility.

So far in this series, we’ve looked at the development of US and Western European anti-tank guided missiles, from their origins in a German WWII design program to their introduction to combat — just in time to encounter Russian missiles designed along similar lines — in the Vietnam War. (The Russian missiles got the first kill, by a couple of weeks). Today we’ll extend the story of early ATGMs by discussing how the Russians developed their missiles, and how Russian missiles figured in Arab planning for in the Yom Kippur War (the Ramadan War, to the Arabs, and the October War to the strictly neutral) of 1973. Unlike the Vietnam offensive of 1972, where they were only locally decisive, the robotic tank-killers decided battles and nearly won the war. We’ll have more about the war in a future installment (this one is already over 2500 words — oversized for a web post).