Weapons Man

This delightful Schadenfreude-activator is an excerpt from a thumbsucker at the New York Observer, about the 10,000 lb. gorilla of city journalism, the New York Times. The NYO is upset that the NYT is downsizing again, terminating such vital personnel as the “advertising writer,” by which they mean someone who writes about advertising, not someone who writes advertising and thereby fulfills some economic function.

Back in the Secondary Armament discussion, one of the commenters reminded us that early marks of the M3 Medium Tank had fixed forward-firing machine guns. That’s quite true.

Next time you’re hearing some nasal radiator explain how he’s got forty-eleven traps on USS Boat, and how that makes him clearly and evidently the Greatest Living Aviator, ask him about these guys.

From a few angles this gun looks like a Colt 1911:

A rather creepy vision of the future, from science-fiction authoress Sarah Hoyt.

Or maybe it’s the other way around, only gun-violence activists will be outlaws?

By all accounts, Ismail Brinsley was a crank. He was also a Moslem, if a somewhat selective one whose “cafeteria Islam” let him drink and use drugs to his heart’s content (as, you may recall, the supposedly devout 9/11 attackers and Boston Marathon bombers did). He was also a petty criminal, something Islam frowns on — officially, at least. But from his point of view, he was going to wipe his slate clean of any such sins, after all, by performing the ultimate Moslem sacrament, cold-blooded murder.

We’ve unboxed it, and dressed it up (down?) with the actual buttstock from our 2002-03 tour of Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and “other places,” a stock retired from military service to an ignominious end in a dumpster (kind of like what the VA does to us, now that we think about it).

Eh, that’s where the workshop is — in the catacombs of Hog Manor.

In Australia, many (but not all) guns are outlawed, but that didn’t stop their answer to Octomom from wiping out her 7-child brood, plus an extra kid.

A VA procurement official, Iris Cooper, assisted by another, Wendy McCutcheon, engaged in a pattern of corruption, leeching over $15 million intended to benefit veterans off to a friend’s company through deceptive sole-source contracts. A previous investigation found that the entire project was useless; it had no reason for being, except as a vector for dollars to the connected.

While we’re talking tanks — we’ve recently covered armor protection in WWII and rates of turret traverse, and the technical considerations that went into them — let’s talk a little about secondary armament.

One of the best polymer pistols is the Smith & Wesson M&P series, which show that old dogs really do learn new tricks. Smith was slow to respond to the threat of the Glock to its bread-and-butter police business; its first responses were halting screwups, followed immediately by the Sigma debacle1. But with the M&P they finally got it right. And it’s a common pistol among concealed carriers and in the holsters of cops nationwide.

“Things that one ought not to do” is a very long list, and one most of us don’t dwell on overmuch, because it would never occur to us to do something like this:

Open wide!

John at NYC CNC shows you how to do it in this video playlist at You Tube.

The editors of Shooting Illustrated did something wicked smart — they gave one of those new “guns for gals” to an actual gal to review, but even more cleverly, they gave it to one who was able to appreciate the engineering, not only the feminine colors (wait. How many of the women you know drive pink cars? Not knowing any Mary Kay reps, my answer is ze-ro. Interesting fact, that). But in this case, the designers of the gun, European American Armory (and their production partners, Italy’s Fratelli Tanfoglio) redesigned the firearm around the fact that there is sexual dimorphism in the human species.

Here’s a few stories of people indulging in behavior not normally associated with their professions.

Let’s get out a straight edge and connect some dots, shall we?

We saw this blurbed at Instapundit: