Weapons Man

The following film of a live lecture appears to date to the 1970s. (Ignore the placeholder picture, which seems to be some posed nonsense, and ignore that fact that the idjit who posted it to YouTube thinks it’s SF-related). It’s definitely post-1973 as they refer to the experiences of returning Vietnam POWs. The lecturer, Capt. Arthur, a Medical Service Corps officer, wears the combat field medical badge, suggesting he is a Vietnam veteran, but he’s too young to be 15-20 years out of combat, which rules out most of the 1980s. In addition, he’s wearing the men’s khaki Class B uniform, which went out of service in October, 1981. A woman in the class is wearing one of the oddball 70s womens’ uniforms that went out sometime between 1980 and 81.

In 2016, Remington will be celebrating its 200th Anniversary in, or near, Ilion, NY.

These pistols for sale on GunBroker come with a rare claim: they were used by one of the nation’s most important special operations units during a period in the mid-oughts when that unit was flat-out in a radical optempo on worldwide CT missions (and other missions as well).  Not just “pistols like these,” but these exact pistols are represented as having been used in that particular SOF unit. They have a letter of authenticity from a former unit member who did have access and placement to know about the unit’s armament initiatives at the time.

The annual bear hunt in New Jersey, resumed after 40 years of protection in 2005 as black bear populations spiraled, also kicks off another annual tradition: opposition to the hunt by animal-rights extremists.

At Rice University in Houston, Texas, researchers in nanomaterials have come up with an interesting substance that has some armor potential — because, set up as a sacrificial membrane, it can leech incredible amounts of kinetic energy out of a projectile.

During the Cold War, one of the many types of leverage exploited by the “belligerents,” the USA and the USSR, was armament sales. But as the nations in each power’s camp got more sophisticated, they wanted to develop or at least manufacture their own weapons.

While there are plenty of stranglings, we’ve never yet see a guy arrested for trying to strangle a Shih-Tzu. It’s even funnier, when you think about it. He failed. Not just because the snack-sized dog overcame him, but the little old lady whose dog it was beat him up, too, and wrestled the pooch away from him. Loser!

From almost the very start of the Great War, the British were bedeviled by Zeppelin raids. The airships could fly far higher and faster than many of the airplanes sent to oppose them. They also raided by night, and in pre-radar days were hard to find and intercept.

This awesome animation comes from former Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week C&Rsenal, who continue to do amazing things with photography. If you study this carefully, you’ll understand just how unique the Walther design was at the time: the ingenious tipping block is widely explained, but here you can see it. You can see how the easily-manufactured pin is a key part of positive unlocking on recoil, and you can see how the unique dual recoil springs were used to keep the breech face area wide open, eliminating one cause of jams entirely.

Well, not megaguns exactly, but 200 mega-NICS-checks. Oy.

The coupon never expires, but they didn’t say anything about the patient.

Happier days: George Washington arrives in Yokosuka in September, 2008, with sailors lined up in a Japanese message of greetings. 

There’s a few things going on in the world of sniper rifles.

Through blind luck, the current Rock Island Premier Auction has one of every major variant of Browning-Colt production (even, very low production) pistol from the earliest Model 1900 “sight safety” locked-breech pistol through the 1911, 1911/24 Transitional, and 1911A1 issue pistols. These are three of the oldest: a 1900, a 1900 converted to 1902 (lacking any safety whatsoever), and a 1902 military (square butt and lanyard ring).

In all the drama, we didn’t see some of the great messages of the season, like this one from Senator-Elect Tom Cotton, from Arkansas.

Anti-tank, anti-armor, and armor-piercing ammunition needs to have a specification describing its penetration. Now, any scientific test would be buried in disclaimers and details. What muzzle velocity, what difference, what angle, what atmospheric conditions. But there are certain norms.  It’s customary to convert ambient temperature and pressure during the test  to an international standard atmosphere, 59ºF and 29.95 inches of mercury. It’s customary to convert slanted armor to its thickness equivalent along the axis of the shot. And it’s customary to describe penetration as distance, millimeters or inches, in a specific medium, RHA.

Some days we sits and thinks, and some days we just sits.

This has been one of those Type B days so far.

We scarcely posted anything Saturday, which wasn’t entirely intentional, but is just a consequence of life at this time of year, between holidays, family, weather, and projects old and new all getting demanding all at once.

Some National Guardsmen patrolling the wreckage of Ferguson, Missouri came on a remarkable, and alarming, sight: black men with guns, their leader a 6’8″ giant cradling an AR-15. They stood in the forecourt of a Conoco gas station, a building that rose, unmolested, like a meth addict’s last solitary tooth in a micro-Hiroshima landscape of boarded-up, or, worse, looted and burned, small businesses.

Sharon Helman, the Director of the VA Medical Center in Phoenix, was fired this week. She was suspended (with full pay, so “placed on vacation” is more like it) back in April when it came out that she’d destroyed evidence in the agency’s cover-up of the deaths of dozens of neglected veterans. Seven months’ pay for doing nothing sounds like a rip-off of the vets and taxpayers, but it could have been worse: she could have been being paid for going in to work, and we’ve already seen how that worked out.