Weapons Man

Here’s what’s happening in some stories we’ve followed before, sourtesy of the Stars and Lies Stripes:

• Yeah, it’s Army camo. Tell it to the Marines.

  In The Case of the Micturating Marines™, lawyer James Weirick has filed a further complaint related to his charges that Commandant of the Marine Corps James Amos has exercised unlawful command influence:”This week, Weirick took the fight a step further, charging in a complaint filed with the agency that oversees classification of secrets that senior Marine Corps officials improperly classified material that could have assisted defense lawyers representing the Marines under investigation.” The writers, from the generally anti-military Washington Post, go on

In the anthology we have, the poem The Kiss is described neutrally as “resulting from” a lecture that young infantry officer Siegfried Sassoon received early in the war, on April 25, 1916. “For close on an hour he talked, and all who listened caught fire from his enthusiasm,” Sassoon wrote about the lecture, in which a fierce officer from a Highland regiment repeatedly stated that, “The bullet and the bayonet are brother and sister.”

The line haunted Sassoon, and he used it first in this poem, which would become controversial later, and the literal meaning of which he would come to disavow, and later, he used

Yesterday was glorious — well into the sixties and sunny, despite a cold and wet forecast. Frantic yard work ensued — you don’t get chances like that in these latitudes this time of year. Around 11 PM the cold and wet arrived, in an unexpected form: instead of steady rain we had (and still have) a mist of very thick sea fog, just above freezing, that has cold-soaked (in both senses of “soaked”) the local environment.

By now (0800) the fog has lifted to the point where going to the range is a possibility, barely, but the forecast remains for worse.

This is one of several films made about the notorious Colditz prison in the mountains of Saxony. An old castle, Colditz — officially Oflag IVc — was believed to be escape-proof — and so the Nazis sent the worst and most incorrigible Allied escapers there, almost all of whom were British and Commonwealth, Dutch and French officers (German POW management segregated officers from other ranks, but frequently mixed nationalities and branches of service). 

The strategy of putting all your most ingenious escapers in a single, however formidable, prison, would seem to have some obvious deficiencies, and in fact, some 300 escape attempts were made, with 31 escapers succeeding (British, French and Dutch prisoners). There were tunnels, rope alpinism down the site’s 250-foot walls and cliffs, and even a 2-seat glider with a 33-foot wingspan (the camp was liberated by American ground troops before the glider was ready). If ever there was a prison camp made for the movies, Cold

And they won’t necessarily beat them into AKs like Boris did before doing naughty things with them.

Arizona police say a man charged with killing his grandmother beat the woman with a shovel before slitting her throat because he was upset with her strict curfew rules and how much she charged him for rent.

Jason Eric Howell is charged with first-degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, hindering prosecution and abandoning a body. The 40-year-old does not yet have an attorney. He was being held Wednesday in the jail’s psychiatric unit and was unavailable for comment.

via Arizona police: Man killed grandmother with shovel, knife over strict curfew, pricey rent | Fox News.

While there’s a certain environmentalist economy in the idea of using the same tool to whack granny and to inter her, here at WeaponsMan we like to think wqe’re

Generic Al-Qaeda flag

The black flag of al-Qaeda flies over rebel-held Syria. While there was once a liberal-leaning, western-oriented spirit of resistance to Bashar Assad’s authoritarian rule, the forces fighting Assad are increasingly the forces of organized political Islam: backward, brutial, bestial. They’re also pretty incompetent, as this story tells us.

And speaking of incompetent, after dropping the ball on supporting the now-exiled or -dead secular liberal opposition, these worthy gentlemen are what the United States is supporting:

(CNN) — Radical anti-government fighters in Syria mistakenly beheaded a wounded fellow rebel soldier after assuming he was a supporter of President Bashar al-Assad, according to an online statement from the radical fighters’ group.
A separate online video showed a gruesome display of radical fighters holding what appeared to be the victim’s head.
After the beheading

We’ve heard you, and we’re giving you not one, but two ways to find Gun Technical posts going forward.

First — we made it possible to find select technical posts in a single area, although were’re still populating the page. If you look to the right sidebar, you’ll see Pages and under Pages you’ll see:

The Best of WeaponsMan Gun Tech.

That Page will be updated with an organized list of technical articles as (a) they’re posted going forward, and (b) they’re added as we root through the nearly 2,000 posts already on the site and separate the sheep from the goats.

That’s only one way forward though. We’ve also added a Gun Tech Category and we’ll be assigning that category to appropriate posts, both going forward and going back. In the meantime, some of the other categories may also be useful to you.

Of course, you can always go ogle something particular by apending to that search term, in the Go Ogle search bar, “site:weaponsman.com.” The “site” switch in Google syntax constrains the search to the given URL and can be very useful (for example, in finding something on dtic.mil or .mil in general).

Let us kn

We’re not lawyers around here, it’s not our comfort zone. So we’re not always sure, for example, when you should shoot somebody and when you should refrain, although we’ll always be glad to recommend something to shoot him with. So we’re having trouble figuring out what’s happening with this court case, where a Portsmouth, NH, lawyer is suing his town because they denied his shall-issue carry permit renewal.

The reason? His references didn’t respond. But the references aren’t required to respond, under the black-letter law: they’re not required to exist by the law at all but lines for references were added by the state bureaucrat who drafted the form, without any explicit legal authority.

Anti-gun officials in Portsmouth, including Police Chief Stephen duBois and Captain Mike Schwartz, and City Attorney Bob Sullivan, have been using the references and other minutiae to try to turn the sta

Niiiice kitty….

Ever have one of those cats that just didn’t like what you tried to feed him? That can be a problem, when kitty’s big enough to eat you. 

The longtime employee killed by a cougar this weekend at a suburban Portland animal sanctuary had expressed concerns about safety measures at the facility, her mother said Monday.

Renee Radziwon of Portland was killed Saturday while cleaning a cougar enclosure at WildCat Haven in Sherwood. The 36-year-old wife and new mother had worked as an animal care technician and head keeper at the sanctuary for the past eight years.

via Oregon cougar attack victim was concerned about facility’s safety, mom says | Fox News.

Other article

We’ve all seen this picture from an inept (but Croesus-rich) marketing department’s catalog shot: the ultimate example of a bozo’s attempt to “pass” in the gun culture. (If you haven’t we explain its origin in our post on the Larry Correia “HK: Because you suck, and we hate you” meme).

The backwards rounds have become a pretty standard internet gag when taking HK pictures, since the factory shipped a catalog without QC’ing it.

As much as we like to make fun of the Gnomes of Oberndorf and their adoring Bund of American wannabes, we would  never think that anything printed by H&K or HKUSA would be used as instructional material by criminals.

3D printed guns. Well, they blow some up, and they try to blow others up. These four films (one is “above the fold,” and three more are visible if you click the “more” button)  are the product, we read with some alarm, of an interagency group led by ATF reacting to the “threat” of 3D weaponry. Few things could be more chilling to future technology that government agents looking to ban or criminalize it. On the other hand, the Powers That Be tried to ban those noisy, stinky motorcars (or impose “common sense measures” like having a guy walking ahead with a red flag) and became technological roadkill; many 3DP adherents, like Cody Wilson, think that the technology simply can’t be banned — it’s too widespread, too distributed, and too useful. We’re more inclined to see this technological development as orthogonal to the law: the law will treat a 3D printed firearm or firearm part no differently than one cast from ingots, milled from a forging, or sawn from bar stock.

ATF’s statement with the vid

We know, kind of a dog bites man story. The TSA has failed at everything, and it’s really no good at anything, except turning welfare bums into an angry and corrupt version of Paul Blart, Mall Cop. But from time to time some other branch of government investigates some aspect of the TSA’s work, in this case their Behavioral Detection Officers. Red-on-red ensues.

A BDO is an 82-IQ TSA guy given some pop-psychology training in spotting terrorist “tells,” who then goes out and harasses the traveling public with his insta-expertise. In this case the investigating agency is the amusingly named Government Accountability Office, which always strikes us as something like a Whorehouse Saving It for Marriage Office. The GAO report to Congress is here. The underlying and larger GAO Study is here. The bottom line, per GAO, is that per the psychological state of the art:

[T]he ability of human observers to accurately identify d

A thousand years ago, Vikings had a technology their many enemies couldn’t match: the Ulfbehrt sword. No one knows who, or what, Ulfbehrt was. The name does not exist in surviving documents at all. Was it a man’s name? Perhaps not, as swords with the name were made for some 200 years. The name of a lost god? A name for the product, an early trademark? No-one knows. But the swords were reputedly of unequalled quality. Now, in this NOVA documentary from last year, it turns out that the swords really were superior, and their hand-smelted and -forged metallurgy was a primary reason why.

Ric Furrer, an American blacksmith who attempts, in the show, to duplicate the Ulfbehrt sword using 1st-millennium technology, has this to say:

These were, to a large extent, secrets. You didn’t want to give away your manufacturing technology for your weaponry to anybody else. So, we have to look at the artifact and then reverse engineer. Sometimes it’s a matter of removing a 32nd of an inch here or adding it there or…subtleties that you don’t think matter that can, in fact, make a huge d

We may be mixing two criminological concepts in that headline, but we’re talking about the lepers who go into a Victim Disarmament Zone and start shooting. So we wanted to call your attention to an important article in the Wall Street Journal weekend edition. It’s on Page C1 (first page of the Review section) if you have the hard copy of the paper. It’s illustrated by a brilliantly symbolic graphic by Daniel Bejar, showing a youth with a rifle in a spotlight. If you haven’t got that paper, we’ll get you some links at the end of our comments.

One of the most interesting features of Schulman’s article is that guns scarcely figure into his analysis at all. He tosses out a single anti-gun shibboleth, but it’s clear that he sees the problem as one of human behavior, not one caused by inanimate objects. And he suggests a practical method of preventing that behavior — the first one we have seen, and one we were already using instinctively.

He reviews a lot of literature and finds that killers, like the

First, we’ll stipulate that the victim is a weirdo, and his mental dysfunction probably endangered him in the first place. But while you can point, and laugh, and jeer at weirdos, John Law is entitled to take a dim view of you setting them on fire. That’s a new one for the Big List of Bad Crap You Risk When You Ride Public Transit®.

A 16-year-old Northern California boy has been charged as an adult with assault and aggravated mayhem after police say he set another teen on fire on a public bus.

Alameda County prosecutors charged Richard Thomas, of Oakland, on Thursday in Monday’s attack on 18-year-old Luke “Sasha” Fleischman.

Oakland police say Fleischman was asleep on an AC Transit bus and wearing a kilt-like skirt when another passenger set the garment ablaze.

The young man’s mother and friends say Fleischman identified as “genderqueer,” a designation sometimes adopted by individuals who see themselves as neither male nor female.

The trouble with clandestine operations is that, if they go wrong, you’re dead, if you’re lucky. If you’re not lucky? 20 years in solitary in Mao’s China. This movie, a CIA official production, tells the story of John Downey and Bob Fecteau, two very junior (as in, GS-4) CIA officers who were lost over China on their first and only operational mission, an attempt to conduct a surface-to-air recovery of a Chinese agent. (The agent, and the team before him, had been captured and doubled).

The CIA learned many policy and tradecraft lessons from the case of Downey and Fecteau, but we found just as fascinating the personnel, administrative, and financial lessons learned. A bespectacled administrative officer is an unlikely hero of the story, along with the two captives. The Agency is understandably proud about what this case says about Agency people and values. They’re also self-critical, which Chairman Mao would tell you is the way to self-improvement.

Could you stand up to two decades’ harsh solitary confinement? Men walk among us who know the answer, because they learned it the hard way. The day after Veterans’ Day is a go

When it’s a “rifle grip” – which is the US Army’s official nomenclature for the pistol grip on AR-series rifles, from the M16A1 which still exists in Army warehouses, to the latest M4A1 variants on the front line.

The Army has different names for many parts than the ones used by the AR community at large, or even the designers and manufacturers of the AR-15, M16, and M4 series weapons. As a result, you can be tripped up, or at least confused, when trying to follow some military maintenance procedures.

Some of these names are not really logical, and in true bullet-headed military fashion, they give the same name to several discrete parts. For example, all coil springs are called “Compression Helical Spring” (which is of course the techbical term for any standard coil spring) even though the “compression helical spring” in the buffer tube (uh, “spring receiver holder”) is quite a different thing from the “compression

At the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, we were on a Concept 2 rowing machine, and thinking about the VA. It’s a tossup which one produced more heat and perspiration.

We never went to the VA much and quit going entirely because of something they do. Might have to reevaluate that — with individual insurance, we’ve seen our health care zeroed out by the Affordable Care Act (we can pay more, but can’t see any of our physicians any more, and have to drive by the good local hospital to go to the gang of barbers 40 minutes away, best known for giving 59 people hepatitis recently. But hey, 50 of them didn’t die, there is that). And the VA has sent out a form letter indicating that they still love us, even after the rest of the Government and their spawn, the insurance companies, have cut us loose. But you can’t get through any kind of treatment at VA without a grilling designed to declare you a PTSD sufferer.

Don’t have PTSD, sorry.

Bu

Thursday, we told the story of stolen FBI firearms. Soon after, we updated the story with information we’d received that “we [FBI] have recovered our guns.” So, how did the FBI get their weapons back? Turns out, the heroes of the recovery are not G-men. Let’s roll back to the moment of the theft, and show you a timeline. It went like this:

• 6 Nov 13. An FBI agent assigned to the regional SWAT team (an additional duty) came home from work and parked a g-ride outdoors. As usual, this individual left cased firearms in the vehicle. The vehicle was locked but the firearms not otherwise secured.
• 6-7 Nov 13. A youthful career criminal, “well known to police” from previous arrests, with unspecified friends, goes down the street breaking into cars and stealing what he finds. At the FBI car, the thieves hit the jackpot; that’s their last score of the night. Too excited to keep burgling cars, they bug out with the guns. Reportedly, they leave behind other sensitive items. The t

Shocks the conscience. If you have a conscience, which neither this kid, nor the lawyers (on both sides) that negotiated this crappy plea deal have. Despite pleading to capital murder, the morally-defective kid will be out when he’s 37, in plenty of time to commit his next murder.

A 14-year-old North Texas boy has pleaded guilty to fatally beating a 5-year-old with a bowling ball after becoming irritated when the child kept asking to be taken to the store.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram reports that the teen pleaded guilty Wednesday to capital murder and will be incarcerated for 23 years as part of a last-minute plea agreement. Authorities are not identifying the Fort Worth teen because he’s a juvenile.

via Texas teen pleads to killing 5-year-old boy with bowling ball | Fox News.

Speaking of morally defective, the Associated Press writer of this story didn’t get the vi