Weapons Man

“So Long, Mom, I’m off to drop the bomb, so don’t wait up for me.” (Actually F-15Es RTB after busting ISIL trucks in Syria, 23 Sep 14. USAF photo, SrA Matthew Bruch). Click to embiggen.

We’ve been wanting to write about fakes for a while. But we’ve been handed this guest post by the guys at Rock Island Auctions. We’ll have editorial comment on the subject of fakes, later, but right now, we’re going to give it to you the way it came in, with no editorial adjustments except for an added title, and typo and grammar fixes, which if substantive, will be in brackets: [ weaponsman insert]. -Eds.

We always thought that Rio de Janeiro Christ the Redeemer statue was a gigantic slab of concrete. It turns out that its face is covered in tiles of mortared soapstone. (It was designed by a sculptor, but built by engineers). And every once in a while somebody’s got to go up there and maintain those tiles, along with the lightning rods that prevent God from doing what Muslim iconoclasts would to this one of the 7 wonders of the world. And this is what that looks like:

This disaster, which took place on 9 June 2014, is a classic “chain of errors” mishap. Several players in this tragedy made critical mistakes and misjudgments. They misunderstood each other’s capabilities. If any one of the errors hadn’t happened, the friendlies wouldn’t have died. If the chain had only been broken at any point, they’d still be alive today. So there’s a lot to learn from this one.

Kevin de Leon is a California state rep who hates guns and the people who like them. Tonight, as we write this, he’s quivering in a puddle of his own urine, because de Leon, who coined the scary term “Ghost Gun,” now knows that someone — his own bête noir, Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed — has automated the completion of 80% lower receivers. Not just that, but he’s automated the completion of other tasks that can be completed on a very small CNC machine.

Are we sick of VA failures? What a silly question. Of course we are! We bet you are, too. Almost everybody is sick of VA failures… especially those poor bastards, VA patients.

ITEM: News sources are reporting that the instructor who plugged David Kedra did it during mechanical training on the new SIG P227 pistols in the classroom. This is pretty much the definition of negligent homicide. Emphasis in the below quote is ours:

We told you they would fail. Then we told you they did fail. Now everybody, it seems, is going, “Wowzers, these strikes have failed?” No kidding, Mr Holmes.

The Browning workshop, back in the day.

The issue with gun publications, whether they’re the paper kind or the online kind, is that they’re generally so dependent on the goodwill of manufacturers that they tend to puff everything. We’re going to pick on one article at Shooting Times, from earlier this year: a comparo of seven budget ($400-900) 1911 clones. The guns were from an array of mainstream handgun makers: Magnum Research, American Tactical Imports,  Auto-Ordnance, Ruger, Para, Springfield, and Taurus.

A Louisiana restaurant offering tasty Cajun food — that’s not terribly special; it’s the local cuisine (well, ½ of it; we can’t forget Creole), like steak in Texas, or lobster in Maine. But Bergeron’s Restaurant in Port Allen has a discount policy a WeaponsMan can get fat on: carry your gun to the joint, take 10% off your tab.

We heard about this early last evening as it came over the scanner. At first we did not want to publish it as it provides a data point for any hostile feeding information to fugitive Eric Frein, but  it was in the media by midnight1, so we might as well.

Himself.

This Viral Brothers video may have been entirely staged for all we know, but it shows a guy, er, defending his property from vandalism:

Trooper David Kedra: EOW 30 Sep 14. 

We have two stories here, and the final score is tied up at cats 1, humans 1. First, the picture says it all: suicide. By tiger.

Hewp me! I’m twaumatized!

German combatants took shelter in the “Helden-Keller” (Cellar of Heroes).

We’re not real capital-p Preppers here — when five pills a day keep you alive and mobile, TEOTWAWKI is quite literally Doomsday, or the gateway to it, so our maximum use-by date is maybe D+365 at best, But we do believe in small-p preparedness, You’re unlikely to see a New Ice Age, or Waterworld, or the desertification of the American breadbasket, or Nuclear World War, in your lifetime. Those are all calamitous events, but they’re very unlikely.

We live in a small place, the nation’s shortest coastline, and we have joined a bunch of minority groups (veterans, gun people, writers, defense contractors, musicians, bike riders, etc., etc.) further narrowing our social horizons. Therefore, ours is a small world, and there are not that many people, for example, active in our small gun club. (We’re not really “active.” Gun club politics don’t interest us, we’re just in it for a place to shoot). So imagine the shock here at Hog Manor South when we’re reading the hometown news and find a link that baits us to click it, thinking there’ll be a Don’t Be That Guy story in it. We’re not sure what we were expecting, but we were pretty shocked to learn that we knew that guy.