Weapons Man

Here’s The Hole Book, by Peter Newell. New York: Harper & Brothers, October 1908. In verse and illustrations, Newell tells the story of Tom Potts, who was “fooling with a gun” when, “bang! the pesky thing went off.” The shot he recklessly fires a shot causes all kinds of mischief. The gun is naturally a revolver, and not one of those newfangled Browning things:

Journalists wonder why America hates them, and why they poll lower than telemarketers, pedophiles, ebola or even Congress. If any journalists happen to read WeaponsMan, they’ll find out by the end of this post.

So there’s an M16A2 upper on GunBroker last week, and no one is bidding. We’ve bolded the reason why.

Here along the Seacoast, summer is a flash that comes between the home and yard repair season of May and June and the Deal With the Leaves season of October and November. (At least last year, November-April inclusive were the Shoveling Season). The first couple of weeks of September are the last flowering of our short summer.

We enjoy them.

At a bookstore recently, we scarfed up a few novels to use as intellectual breaks from work and time-killers, not that time-killing is really a thing around here. Two of them are of interest because they’re from authors we’ve been reading for 40 years, and who are still writing. Having finished the books, we found them both flawed, but we liked one much more than the other, and found they had some things in common.

Criminy, how many machete murders are there in a year? But wait, this is in Old Blighty, where guns are outlawed. (Handguns anyway).

This one is a big deal. A commenter flagged us to it, and we took our time getting to this “Original Armalite AR-10″ because we figured: “Ho hum, Dutch Artillerie Inrichtingen AR-10, interesting but we’ve written about ‘em already. A lot.” And… well, when we finally looked at the AR, it wasn’t a mass-produced gun from the Portuguese or Sudanese contract at all, but one of the earliest, hand-built prototypes, a gun that would not only be a centerpiece in an AR collection or modern military arms collection, but would be a centerpiece in many museums. 

Ex- (not “former,” he’s definitely “ex” these days) SEAL Jesse Ventura has some show we’ve never watched on some cable channel we’re not going to waste time trying to find. And he’s going to find out who weally weally blew up the World Trade Center, how fire melted steel for the first time (Mr Bessemer, call your office), and what planet the passengers on the plane that he’s sure didn’t hit the Pentagon are being held captive on. Or maybe it’s one of NASA’s sound-stages where they faked moon landings — ol’ Glass Jaw Scruff Face is kind of hard to follow these days.

Reporters from the New York Times interview a massacre survivor. To us, the most moving part was Ali watching his own attempted execution on a reporter’s MacBook, and his wordless reaction. But he also tells a tale of survival that has components of dumb luck, and good-samaritan action by Sunnis who might easily have turned him in.

2000-vintage PEQ-2 on an M4 clone. This unit was IR only — note blue lock keeping switch on low power. TNVC image. Click to embiggen.

There are days when we get a lot done. And there are days when a lot goes up on the blog. They’re not necessarily the same days. Back at it this morning, but things may be slow for a while. The analogue world has requested the pleasure of our company.

While the US is bumbling around, with the executive branch unable to recognize much beyond the fact that it is a problem and that we do have utterly no strategy whatsoever, our long-time key European Continental ally, Germany, is acting decisively to provide useful and practical weapons to the front lines of Western civilization: the Kurdish Pesh Merga warriors.

A lot of media and a lot of the public have talked about the shooting of suspect Michael Brown by Ferguson, MO police officer Darren Wilson. Stephen Hunter (yes, the movie critic turned sniper novelist) has a post at Powerline that, as he puts it, tries “something new… look at the shooting as a shooting.” And he does just that. His conclusions:

To the four clean-cut college freshman out on a double date, it had seemed like a typical McDonald’s: spanking clean, well-lighted, and safe. It was in a good neighborhood too, right next to Texas A&M University in College Station – a campus known for its friendly atmosphere and official down-home greeting: “howdy.”

Compared to some historical American small arms, that were made by many contractors, only a few fims made the M-16 and M-16 A1 rifles. Most of them were made by Colt, but nearly a quarter of a million each were made by Hydramatic Division of General Motors, and Harrington and Richardson.

Map of pre-surrender UNDOF positions. Click to embiggen, or select scalable .pdf.

Here’s a thread in ARFcom’s Build It Yourself forum where the consequences of gorilla (no, not “guerrilla”) gunsmithing come home to roost.

For a long time now, the parents of deceased special operations warriors have been asking questions, and making comments, that their sons wouldn’t have been able to, even if alive. You can talk about the politicians who throw your teammates’ lives away behind the doors of the team room, but as long as you wear the uniform, you can’t say stuff like that in public. Your parents, though, aren’t gagged — especially after you’ve been whacked. And so they can write:

He flew a drone in Yellowstone
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Clearly the mass sacking of Captains and Majors (and the rush of officers and NCOs with options for the exits) has produced a brain drain. This left the DA Civilians in Program Executive Office Soldier, the massive bureaucracy that manages to bungle most small arms developments that don’t originate as COTS developments or SOF initiatives at NAVSEA Crane, without adult leadership.