Weapons Man

The monster of the 20th Century came tumbling down in Kharkiv, a Ukrainian city that was the scene of calamitous tank battles between two of world history’s most evil empires.

PGMs on an MQ-9 Reaper. If it only had a brain.

We like to have an illustration for every post. You will see presently why this one does not have an illustration. In other words, prepare for some eeeeew, yuck! Take it awaaay, Salt Lake County Tribune:

Mills Bomb Nº 36. Note that Bubba has been at the filling plug with a misfit screwdriver.

Let’s begin with a guy whose message we picked up in an SF-centric communications medium. He’s the sort of guy that gets named a Distinguished Member of the Regiment, although he hasn’t been, yet.  (What’s a Distinguished Member? We don’t have a Hall of Fame, like déclassé mobs such as the Ragnars, OCS, pro sports leagues, and rock n’ rollers. We’re more… distinguished). Anyway, like many of a certain age, he alternates between a house in a cold place in the warm months, and a house in a warm place in the cold months. Arriving at his cold months warm place at summer’s end, he’s been unable to get a VA appointment, but he’s collected a lot of lip from various scheduling bureaucrats, soi-disant “Patient Advocates,” and all the other payroll patriots that make dealing with the VA a test of one’s patience. (We said we were distinguished… not patient).

This video, found on Soldier Systems Daily, is a 1985 briefing on the FBI Hostage Rescue Team. The HRT was riding high at the time, coordinating closely with military special operations forces assigned the hostage rescue mission (overseas; FBI had authority stateside), and years from its appalling 1990s performances that included a sniper team getting (deservedly) indicted for homicide and saved only by a legal maneuver that introduced a technicality preventing prosecution.

OK, we’re actually in one of the wealthiest zip codes in the glittery end of the Atlantic Coast, but we just discovered the word “scablands,” which so aptly describes the areas where much of a long military career was whiled away, and we could not resist using it. Sure, there are scablands inland of us, but we’re in kind of anti-scablands. But there is no foul in unleashing one’s inner child sometimes.

Have you ever had a bad date? Look at the bright side: it wasn’t as bad as this one.

For many years after World War II, the aircraft of the war were just, “old.” In the heady Jet Age, wartime transports still had economical utility, but the combat types were quickly left behind. They were relegated to duties as instructional airframes for novice mechanics (“learn riveting on this, it’ll never fly again so you can’t screw it up”) or stuck up on plinths as gate guards, showcasing the raw roots of the world’s newest military forces. And those were the survivors: the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of warplanes built for the war ended as scrap metal in the greedy furnaces of postwar industrial recovery. The combat life of a warplane might have been 25 to 100 hours during the war, and perhaps two years from variant introduction to obsolescence; but after the war, the pace of research and development didn’t let up, and the frontline jets of 1946 were outclassed by time of the Berlin Airlift of 1949.

Bullets, you know, have a life of their own. The life begins when the firing pin crushes the primer case and some of the impact-sensitive primer mixture against the primer anvil, and it ends when the spent bullet comes to rest.

The following recommendations were slipped under the transom by a friend of the blog last night. We’re finally getting around to posting them. The first two are free PDFs, and we’ve taken a quick look at them. The third is a review of a book published by the South African publishing house that has been most prolific on Rhodesian memoirs.

First, it’s an ATI to start with, and we’re unaware of anything made by ATI that’s liable to be mistaken for professional military armament quality. But if you had asked us, “Can you make an ATI pistol worse by giving it to Bubba for a style job,” we’d have had to admit that, although we could not imagine how, that if we’ve learnt one thing in this racket it’s this: do not wager against Bubba’s strange marque of insalubrious inspiration.  In fact, we wonder if it’s a Bubba attempt to convert one of ATI’s pot-metal .22s to a .45, with dire but not-yet-catastrophic consequences. Now on GunBroker:

It was an interesting road trip. Averaged ~38 mpg at 79 mph on cruise control. Stuck to the highway (mission, mission, mission) but got to see some interesting people — and guns — along the way.

…Some days, the bear eats you. That’s the calamity that befell Rutgers University student Darsh Patel, who fled from the bear and also discovered the velocity implications of one of Orwell’s famous sayings: “Four legs good, two legs baaaaad.”

Didn’t Arethra have a song about this? But that would not be “Chain of Fools,” rather “Chain of Fool’s”.

This is one of the picture boards the police in Santa Monica, CA put up for the media after a kid named John Zawhri shot family members and then drove through town shooting random people.

Some people have easy decisions in this fall’s elections. This is especially true if you are what we are, single issue voters, and your issue is, like ours is, gun rights.

Andrew Branca has a handy checklist of facts that are necessary to justify the use of deadly force in self defense. You know the deal: risk of death or serious injury, proportional response, all that jazz. But you don’t need his checklist, or his legal training and experience, to know that David William Latham, 55, of Bellingham, WA, doesn’t have a legal leg to stand on. WMUR-TV:

Tam at A View from the Porch, who, thank a merciful God, is back posting (albeit with comments muzzled, which in her circumstances is understandable), earlier this month finally experienced some jams with her well-shot (and thoroughly documented) 9mm Walther PPX. Two jams in one session, actually, and both of them have some lessons for us, even though all our Walthers are so old they were made when lots of people still thought Hitler had some good ideas.