Weapons Man

The following cartoons were made by various talented editorial cartoonists, and they show that regardless of the intention of the idiotic Bergdahl swap, somebody hasn’t forgotten the old geezers of the VA’s wait lists. Here’s Chip Bok, on 3 Jun 14:

Home again, and the small pleasures include:

The latest in our string of bizarre murder weapons is the curling iron, used along with fists to murder 18-year-old Alexandra Kogut. She was found dead in her dorm room and a State University of New York College in Brockport. The man convicted of her killing was her boyfriend, 22-year-old Clayton Whittemore.

AP at Fox News:

A New York man who told police he “just snapped” and killed his girlfriend with his fists and curling iron while visiting her college dorm has been found guilty of murder.

…

Whittemore could face 25 years to life in prison.

Since it’s New York, he’ll be out in less than the smaller number. And he’ll kill again. Because the best guide to future behavior is past behavior.

A few times a year, the CMP holds an M1 armorer class. At the end of the class, you go home with an M1 that you assembled and that’s pretty much guaranteed to work. Assembling an M1 has a little more gunsmithing involved than the shake-the-box assembly of an AR series rifle or the “make it approximate and it’ll work” construction of an AK. There are special skills — like lapping bolt lugs — and special tools required. Here’s the end product:

And it’s all, they admit, “Security Theater.”

You’ve all seen the scene from one of the Jurassic Park movies: the dinner-seeking dinosaur matches it’s background so perfectly, and blends in so perfectly, that it seems to vanish. This is a type of camouflage called background–matching (called “color resemblance” in Cott’s 1940 classic, Adaptive Coloration in Animals), and while it’s a bit speculative in dinosaurs, it’s been used for millennia by other animals — and may be used in the future by humans. We’ve seen it before in a Bond movie, too: the invisible Aston Martin.

Yes, it’s time again to play Stump the Commenters:

From Alex Quade. She is a reporter who has repeatedly embedded with US SOF including Special Forces teams, and who is generally respected by those teams. You can Read The Whole Thing™ at the Society for Professional Journalists’ tumblr.

Not sure why we get that question. When we do, we try to hand the questioner off to someone who can answer it — like a real-deal SEAL. Because we’re Army guys, and while we have some occasional contact with our triphibious brethren of the sign of the trident, we’re not qualified to tell you how to join them. They are, by definition: after all, every single one of them pulled it off.

As we’ve mentioned before, the French go their own way in firearms and have for a very long time. Their designs seldom influence other nations much, and other nations’ developments take their sweet time coming to the armies of the French Republic.

Chris at LuckyGunner has a great post up that runs through his thought process on choosing a .22 as a suppressor host, and he came up with a gun we’d never even heard of (the Smith 2213/2214) after considering a lot of guns we knew well.

The Durham, NH PD had egg on their faces over the weekend, after an officer clicked on what appeared to be a legitimate file attachment, and turned loose a ransomware worm on the department’s network.

In a long and brutal column, the Boston Herald’s columnist Joe Fitzgerald runs down a list of victims of people released by the turn-em-loose-juice addicted Massachusetts courts (reorganized and alphabetic-order, but Fitz’s words):

In a thorough and well-reported article at the St Louis Courier-Dispatch’s website, STLToday, police-beat reporter Joel Currier documents how 28 early Thompsons (and one M1A1) are about to hit the market, and why.

There’s stupid, and then there’s felony stupid. Matthew McMahon, come on down. McMahon apparently gets off on interacting with the public as a law officer. But he has never held an LE certification. Now, he’s seeing criminal justice from a whole new angle. A Florida TV station has the goods on the St. Augustine man’s unusual misconduct:

We’ve seen how these end: with the suicidal person having accomplished his aims at the muzzle of a cop’s gun, and the cops only afterward discovering that the “gun” was a non-gun of some kind, or never existed at all.

Leonard Wong, the sort of West Point grad who stayed as far as he could go from troop command and as deep as he could get in library stacks, has a thoughtful, and, what else? scholarly, take on the history of the all-volunteer Army. It’s online at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He begins, suppressing the zero to some extent, not any time in the great and centuries-long history of American volunteer service, but in 1970, when the military began planning to end the politically divisive peacetime and, not coincidentally, Vietnam War draft.

Nine minutes, from steel 8620 round bar stock. One machine. One setup. The video’s edited down to 3 minutes and was posted almost a year ago, but we just saw it at Shall Not Be Questioned (thanks, Sebastian).

This is one of those days, the ones that are spent watching miles ahead turn into miles behind. Meanwhile, on the other side of the globe, a contract is to be signed today. Too busy traveling to read too much into it.

It does not help that your humble host is sick as the proverbial dog, but that’s why they made boxes of tissues and highway rest areas. Meanwhile, for the next few days some content has been queued to keep you all entertained.

“Sick as a dog” won and the drive, like the D-Day Invasion, was delayed 24 hours.

It dawns on us that in our announcement of the honeycombed howitzer nuts developed by New Jersey firm Imperial Tool with SLM additive manufacturing, we did not elaborate on why we think it’s a big deal.