Weapons Man

Where “Buddy” is only half a word….

This is How Much the Gun Culture has Changed: 50 years ago, the guns on magazine covers were single-shots.

Pakistani forces, driven by an angry PM Nawaz Sharaf, say they have succeeded in whacking one of the Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan ringleaders of the massacre in Peshawar.

There are several good gun-building forums out there. One of them is Home Gunsmithing, sponsored by Roderus Custom Gunworks, which offers some interesting gunsmithing and gun-building plans and threads.

On a blog we read from time to time, one of the team posted this remarkable sentiment: “Good Riddance, 2014.” This is the last Sunday we’ll have in 2014, and as usual at year’s end, we’re taking that arbitrary1 point in time to look back. And we cannot have such a bleak view of the year that has passed.

If you haven’t taken up life underneath a geological feature, you must be aware of the James Franco/Seth Rogen comedy The Interview. Kid dropped the $15 on Google Play to own it, and then he came downstairs, laughing himself silly, and insisting we needed to see it. Like any 15-year-old these days, his sense of humor is attuned to the coarse, even crude comedies being made now, and this one was right up that alley.

New York Mayor Bill De Blasio (née Warren Wilhelm) insisted on making a campaign stump speech at a funeral attended by thousands of cops from the NYPD and elsewhere. NYPD officers were threatened by their superiors not to answer DeBlasio’s disrespect with their own, but when the politician began to speak, the police turned as one, offering their backs to the cop-hating mayor in the latest showing of raw disrespect. The only NYPD officers who didn’t turn their backs were the most politically-oriented white shirts. Most of the visiting officers from elsewhere joined in. Here’s how it looked from the photographer’s gallery under the dais, and therefore pretty close to what it must have looked like to De Blasio.

There’s nothing in the scope for today, dammit.

Rob Marsh’s father was Secretary of the Army John O. “Jack” Marsh. Most of Rob’s colleagues, when he was an enlisted SF medic or when, after he followed the path of many SF medics to medical school and wound up as the special operations unit called Delta’s command surgeon, didn’t know that detail about him.

So, what’s the latest in the VA scandal? According to Richard Oppel at the New York Times, it’s the fact that all of the scandals that were suddenly revealed this spring, and that were received by senior leaders in the department and beyond as “new revelations” and “surprises,” were actually known to them months, even years ago.

These days, with Cuba in the news and our President bowing and scraping to los hermanos pollos Castros, is a good time to reflect on the arms of the Cuban Revolution. A recent biography of one of the many tragic figures of the war, Comandante Americano William Morgan, contained a few brief paragraphs about a homemade gun, the “Cuban Winchester.”

Before you think your career in law enforcement will be like Dragnet, Adam-12, CHiPs, or maybe The Wire, you should spend some time talking to local cops. However, when they hear you dream of being a cop, they will tell you tall tales (when the outburst of laughter ends).

Please note the new page, Gun Design Books and Resources. It went live at 0600 this morning, but because it’s a permanent Page rather than an ephemeral Post, it doesn’t post to the main page. (We’re probably missing some obvious way to make it do this).

You can access it from the margin of the site, above, or by simply clicking the link in this sentence.

It is our intent to provide a comprehensive listing of books for the would-be gun designer or design engineer. We’re aware that we’re a long way from comprehensive as it stands, and we even have some sections that are unpopulated, apart from headings. But we believe that we have listed the key resources available, both online and in hard copy, with a bias towards currently in-print or available sources.

We’re also very, very interested in your suggestions for additions.

We hope you find the page enjoyable and informative.

You read it here first: US Army deserter Bowe Bergdahl, who deserted his unit in combat and aided the enemy with information they used in subsequent attacks of his betrayed unit, is not going to be prosecuted by the Army.

Some of you may recall our occasional references to Kid, a 15-year-old who’s actually an Ex’s spawn, but is a pretty good kid and partner in gun tinkering. Like many such yoot’s, he’s a devotee of video gaming, and his Christmas list included stuff like a controller and the latest version of the Call of Duty series, called Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare.

“He wants a whaaat?” Mr Eliot said. Mr Eliot’s family had been in town since shortly after they filed off the Mayflower, but despite that had befriended the new family in town, even though they were suspiciously ethnic, and even, it must be said, Catholic.

We may or may not do a real year-end wrap-up. We’re doing analog stuff right now and won’t be on the computer much; there will just be a single post Christmas Day, much like we do on Sundays, although this one will be a post that tells a Christmas story.

Page for one of the reenactor units

Recall a case where the attack recipient’s intelligence services had all the clues, but didn’t put them together? Yeah, there’s been a few. Pearl Harbor. Operation Barbarossa. D-Day. The Battle of the Bulge. The Nork invasion of South Korea. The Chinese invasion in support of the Norks. Suez. The Six Day War. The Tet Offensive. The Yom Kippur War. The collapse of Imperial Iran. The Russian invasions of Hungary/Czechoslovakia/Angola (true, it was Cubano proxies)/Afghanistan/you name it. Russia’s H-Bomb. Sputnik I. The collapse of the USSR and European Communism.  9/11. The Bali bombing. It might as well be a motto of governments everywhere: “We never saw it coming!”

We thought for sure we had featured this already, but if so, we can’t find it on the site. This is a sabotage manual  dating to 17 January 44 . It was classified SECRET but was declassified long ago — 14 June 76, to be precise.