Weapons Man

Frederick II “The Great’s” sarcophagus was hidden in a mineshaft by Nazis who feared it would be destroyed by the Allies. It wasn’t (his peripatetic corpse finally was buried on his lawn where he’d originally requested — in the 21st Century).

In Bulgaria… archaeologists are exhuming centuries old… dead vampires? Well, they’re people that someone thought were vampires… judging from their burial with a stake in the heart.

Now that we have stats running, again, we’re pleasantly suprised to see that we’re more popular than we were before our stats plugin went tango uniform in August. We attribute that to our genial commenters and to the sites that link to us, among them:

So Britain banned handguns almost 20 years ago, and violence and criminality vanished forthwith from the scepter’d isle, bringing forth a new age of enlightment made possible by the lights of perverted science.

This site is a worthwhile, irregularly updated look at, like the title says, the history, technology and development of firearms. It’s found at firearmshistory.blogspot.com.

The new, and excellent, memoir of Marine rifleman Sterling Mace (written with pro writer Nick Allen), Battleground Pacific, goes into some detail about what Mace thought about weapons and equipment. Here are some quotes from the book:

Crazy man with knife (file photo).

In the Continuing Adventures of Bubba the Gunsmith™, we’ve seen him savage Glocks (and more Glocks), Lugers (and more Lugers, en français aussi) and mangle 1911s and more 1911s. In long guns, he’s had his way with more ARs than we could count, like this one and this one (something about the modularity of the AR system is irresistible to slow minds and fat fingers), and solved the notorious “tight chamber” er, “problem,” of a National Match M1A barrel. Most recently, we saw his Century Arms International iteration hacking AKs with a Foredom tool.

Each of these is either underway (yeah, we have a lot of books lying around spine-up), has recently been read, or is in the queue to be read. These are de minimus capsule reviews; if time permits, we’ll link the titles to their Amazon pages later today

This lady is Elizabeth Yanez, 42. Or, we should say, was Elizabeth Yanez, who is now no longer with us, or more to the point, with her Whitter, California family. Why not? Because two LA scumbags felt entitled to a parking spot and savaged her with a knife.

Who knew that Canadians in their Parliament would defend themselves with such intensity?

A couple of weeks ago, it was a rare, multi-million-dollar Focke-Wulf 190. This time, the minor but expensive mishap is to a less rare, but still multi-million-dollar P-51 Mustang. Only one landing gear extended, so pilot (and owner) Jeff Pino retracted the gear. The gear came up, but not the gear doors, which hung down and made initial contact during a planned, and well-executed, gear-up landing.

Well, it feels like we are sleepwalking here. Maybe ‘ not. Maybe we’re actually awake, and just wish we weren’t. But it does feel like sleepwalking.

So, Miguel at GunFreeZone posted video of the “Band of Brothers” speech from the excellent cinema version with the talented and committed Kenneth Branagh (then, about the age Henry V would have been). It’s our favorite version, but it’s far from the only one.

Today, as the Washington Post tells this story. It has the feel of a single-source anecdote, of being “too good to check.” It is neat, compact, no one is mentioned by name, and there’s a moral to the story: ready-made for narrative-addicted Posties.

If you ever had to load hundreds (or thousands) of M16 magazines, the second greatest thing ever invented was the stripper clip and stripper-clip-guide system. The mag is easy enough to load by hand, but it’s time-consuming to do it by onesies. Still, the GI system is only the second-best. The best is Maglula’s machined Benchloader, if you’ve got loose rounds: drop the mags in, drop the rounds in, schoooonk, you’re done. Machinery FTW! How it works is not rocket surgery, but here’s a link to a demo of the device from Brownells so you can see it in action; it’s .mp4 video so we couldn’t embed it in WordPress. And here’s a photo of it:

The objective is to clear out our extra tabs, and make up a little for the slow posting this week, by throwing all the links at you that we wanted to post about this week, and didn’t.

The Nobel Peace Prize, administered by a gang of left-wing Norwegian politicians, has become a laughingstock. PJ O’Rourke notes that it has been bestowed about four times for actually making peace, and some 65 times for “wishful thinking.” Essentially, it’s a Big Gong for Stuff White People Like. O’Rourke has, naturally, a modest proposal:

The new discovery, outdoors undergoing conservation.

When the election’s over, whichever bunch of corrupt anti-gun knuckleheads wins, you’ll probably want to console (or prepare?) yourself with a new gun. Our Pennsylvania pals send us the page from the next outing for Savo Auctioneers in the Philadelphia area. What’s nice about this auction house is that it has pieces that are desirable, yet attainable to normal human beings, not to those of you who have to make the tough decision between a new gun and a new Bentley this year.