Weapons Man

Perps Jared (l) and Gerald (r) Smith. Video still. They sure look like a couple of upstanding citizens, eh?

This New Jersey brownstain was outed as a phony SEAL back in the 2011, but the FBI dismissed the idea of charging or prosecuting him then. Stolen valor, they sniffed, is a victimless crime. Except as we, and everybody else in the community knows, the character deficiencies that lead to some nerdy perv playing Action Guy Dress Up like this, are invariably comorbid with other character flaws and other criminal behavior.

Ah yeah, the NYC metro area and especially its trailer-trash cousin, Newark. Where hospitality means leaning on the horn and flipping you the bird — if you’re lucky.

If you want to see inability to decide on a pistol, or maybe it’s just general inability to pour piss out of a boot, you really can’t beat the Pennsylvania State police. They’ve been through three official sidearms in four years, and it’s their own fault. This Pistol OCD has tripped the PSP through pistols so rapidly that they’re not always able to issue all the new ones before changing to the new new one.

In Cuomostan, where the SAFE Act tightened a gun control regime whose nearest comparison is the defunct and failed state of East Germany, the criminilazation of many ordinary guns has ushered in a new era of freedom from crime. Except for crime like this:

The story reads like a press release from the Admiralty and the Air Staff, maybe because it is. The signatories are the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir George Zambellas, and the Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Andrew Pulford. But the op-ed in Britain’s daily Telegraph also gives some feeds and speeds of the freshly-christened HMS Queen Elizabeth, the largest and most capable aircraft carrier to ever fly the White Ensign of the Royal Navy.

Their ranks are thinning, but never was a man more loyal to his gun than the men who carried the Browning Automatic Rifle in combat, many of whom we were privileged to know and serve with.

America’s laziest, stupidest government agency recently took a step into heights of incompetence never imagined by Laurence J. Peter, when they declared themselves inspectors of your cell phone. Apparently they aren’t fully occupied groping and fondling dwarves, and so the Devil has found work for all those idle blue-gloved hands.

Lord love… you know where we were going with that. This could only happen in Canada, where handguns are just about banned, but you can still get killed by an irresponsible animal lover.

Dr Helen Smith, who has specialized in the analysis and treatment of violent children, has an interesting take on a UVA/Harvard psychology study that AFP reports as concluding that, “Many people would rather inflict pain on themselves than spend 15 minutes in a room with nothing to do but think.” It reminded us of one of the surprising causes of attrition in SF training in the 1980s. First, she quotes the gallant French reporters of AFP:

Note: not the Nork target, we found this on pinterest… it’s from an old archery set!

That was the old joke when a family member was a school teacher: any day off taken without good reason or even a flimsy excuse was, ipso facto, a “mental health day.”

That was, pretty much, yesterday. We posted once, and it actually went up very late in the day even though it’s time stamped 0600. We may catch up today — and we may not. Them’s the breaks.

This week: we look at an agency with Pistol OCD, we reverse-engineer a polymer bicycle part just to show you that it can be done, and some of the ways to do it. The applicability to gunsmithing should be obvious.

Not matter what gun you have, the grass is always greener on the other side. This is especially true of government agencies, who are all over the place on pistols, almost as if they weren’t spending their own money! Here are a few examples, which we’ll elaborate on at length next week.

A Golden Gate jumper kills himself in 2004. Jumping from the bridge is almost always fatal. Still from a disturbing movie — you can find it if you want, we aren’t linking.

“Jet, your target is way too many hippies.” “Tally hippies.” “Friendlies are south, make your runs from east or west, cleared to engage! Remain this frequency for BDA.”

This is a lithograph of the original Declaration of Independence. If you want a copy to show off, this is the one — it’s a huge file (National Archives and Records Administration).

It’s been one of those days. The dead Iraq contract has risen from the grave, and if you know anything at all about Hollywood tropes of resurrection, that augurs ill. A multinational training organization that asked for our wisdom did the exact other thing, and didn’t notice until their corner-cutting left them with unsafe personnel (which they sweat too much) and excessive retraining and retesting (which they did sweat, as they are losing vast quantities of money because they programmed training on the assumption that everyone was going to be a first-time go at all stations). And now they want one of our partners to fix it. Fact: you can’t fix stupid, you can only drown it in a babbling brook.

PJs Mark Crawford (l). and Brian Stephens (r.), 1984.

Frank Miniter writes in the normally anti-gun Forbes magazine with a remarkable business story — a profile of the way the spirit reduced to a few handwritten lists, recited with the faithfulness of a cloister’s vespers, animate a business in our industry: Crimson Trace, the maker of compact lasers and laser handgun grips, like the one on the Glock at right. A taste:

We hate reading these things, don’t you? If only the cops hated doing these things, we wouldn’t have to write anout these things. But the cops gotta do ‘em, we gotta write ‘em, and you gotta read ‘em: that’s the way the world works.