Weapons Man

That’s the line John (or is it Jean?) Kerry is getting hung with, after the USG didn’t react to the Paris crimes, except to sympathize with the shooters rather than the shot. And the cartoonists are having fun with it:

The weapon was developed in the greatest of secrecy. It was born in a physics lab before the war, but during the war became a massive project: led by physicists; employing tens of thousands on detailed tasks whose application they did not know; secured by barriers, unsmiling military police, security clearances and teams of counterspies; and encompassing a wide range of industrial effort. It was shared under the most stringent security guidelines with Britain alone, and gave the nations of the Anglosphere combat power unimagined before the war.

The report attached to this post was completed as part of the command investigation into the fate of the 507th and its soldiers. We had to generate this searchable version of the document as part of our research.

us-507th-reportOCR.pdf

While it is marked “FOUO – Close Hold” it has been very widely distributed in the past, although in a non-searchable version. There is nothing in this report that should embarrass any American soldier or his or her family, and there is nothing in here that was not made public over 10 years ago. There are no intelligence sources and methods or valid TTPs revealed in this document.

We’re not seeing much in the way of gun tech news. Sure, we hit our usual places — especially The Firearm Blog and the two indispensable aggregators, The Gun Wire and The Gun Feed, but nothing really moves us.

The New York Times had a monster Page 1 thumbsucker on January 12, 2015. It took no fewer than four hand-wringing Times liberals1 to write no fewer than 2,900 words under the verbose and anodyne title, “In Police Rift, Mayor de Blasio’s Missteps Included Thinking It Would Pass.”

There’s an interesting short speech in the new WEB Griffin novel, The Assassination Option. Now this post isn’t a Griffin review; you either like these books or you don’t, and if you like them in general, you’ll like this one. We’ll just observe that after a rocky start, he books are now coming together much better with an unknown (but presumably large) quantity of the work being done by Griffin’s son, William E. Butterworth IV. The character who says the following, one Major Wallace, is a secondary character in the new book. What you need to know about him is that he is an OSS Jedburgh veteran, and is treated with much respect and deference by the other characters. Here’s what he has to say about operational security in planning clandestine operations:

So, we’re settled back in at home, but the new plan is that we’ll alternate as able, having at least one son present with the old folks for at least one week a month. Right now, more than that would be an imposition; less than that isn’t sufficient burden relief.

We have a few small details to add to this morning’s 507th post.

As we discussed recently in the Wanat two-parter, too much rapid fire yields too much heat, yields barrel temperatures soaring to 1300-1400ºF — and then what yields is the barrel.

We’re longtime readers of The Captain’s Journal here, and probably eight times out of ten we agree with Herschel Smith’s stuff. So it’s no surprise that we agree with his latest post on Wanat (he’s posted many, many times on the battle, and has been covering it for years).

We’re pretty bemused by the whole Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, especially by the people who seem to think that the editors had it coming. Among whom, of course, is the President, who has taken time in the past to condemn those who’d would “blaspheme the prophet.”

Oh, snap. I guess this will get WeaponsMan.com off the White House Eid-al-Fitr Card List, but here’s our favorite Charlie Hebdo cover.

Old Dead Mo (or is it Osama Bin Leaden?) here is saying: “The Koran, it’s for shit! It can’t stop bullets.”

Yes, it’s Major General Scales again, last seen blaming “jammed M4s” for the deaths of 9 guys whose valiant deaths we recounted in our two part Wanat series (Part 1) (Part 2), absolving the M4 in the process. Tam in the comments steered us to more of his unique brand of wisdom, from October, 2013. She asks, “[D]id you see this eulogy-turned-shopping-list from Scales?”

An old saying goes, “It’s better to be lucky than to be good.” A Salem, NH cop was breathing easier Monday after citizens turned in a Colt Commando carbine that he lost Tuesday afternoon. He put the rifle, in a soft “tactical” case, on top of his cruiser and forgot about it, driving off and going blithely about his shift until midnight shift change, when he went to take the rifle out of the trunk, and realized… he’d never put it in there in the first place.

A cable company in Florida “economized” on installation by hiring drug addicts, ex-cons, criminal aliens and thieves for installers. And now, customers have been getting something extra with their cable service — stolen jewelry, money, other valuables and at least one S&W Sigma handgun.

If you’re the kind of gun and history geek (hey! own it) we generally attract to the blog, you’re already familiar with the Krummlauf (“crooked barrel”) attachment to the German MP.44 series assault rifles.

If you’ve seen a B-29 fly in the last few decades, it’s been “FIFI,” the Commemorative Air Force’s flagship and the only surviving airworthy B-29 of some 4,000 built.

Most reporters, of course, don’t even try. We saw a lot of this in reporting of the tragic accident in Idaho, in which a toddler reached into his mother’s handbag and fired a single round — killing his mom instantly.

Long ago, a wise accident investigator told us, “There are no new accidents. Just new pilots having the same old accidents.” He was talking, obviously, about aircraft accidents, but the same is true of gun accidents, and we’re starting to think the same is true of crimes.

Is there any song in history more translated, converted, twisted and parodied that Barry Sadler’s1 The Ballad of the Green Berets? We’re probably too close to the issue to have an opinion, but it sure seems like that to us. In SF, particularly, the song is more likely to be lampooned than taken seriously.

These days, the venerable 98 Mauser has been elevated to a mythical position among the world’s firearms. It is, many writers say, the ne plus ultra of the military turnbolt repeater. To these fans, this position is demonstrated not only by its decades of service in every corner of the world, but also by its impact on every subsequent turnbolt, from the 03 Springfield and the Arisaka Type 38 (1905), to the Remington 700, Winchester Model 70, and Weatherby Mark V, all of which took something from the German original.