Weapons Man

You know, the Federal Aviation Administration is one of the worst-managed and underperforming Federal agencies, something everyone in Washington knows and nobody talks about. For one example, decades of work on “NexGen Air Traffic Control” have squandered literally billions with nothing to show for it; for another, it cost Burt Rutan and Paul Allen $25 million to win the $10 million Ansari X-Prize for private, reusable suborbital spaceflight — and the FAA blew over $100 million regulating their attempt. So in 2002, when Congress removed the badly understaffed, but then, very professional, Federal Air Marshal program from the FAA, everyone understood the subtext.

But then Congress, being Congress, found the only place worse to put the program: the Transportation Security Administration. We’ll pause here for you to groan.

Under TSA, staffing has exploded, while quality has plunged. In fact, even plunged doesn’t quite get the idea across; quality has sounded, in the sense that Moby Dick sounded when harpooned. H

And why do you want it?

This picture should answer the first question. (We don’t know the original source; if it’s yours please advise and we’ll give you credit and a link). And to explain what-all you’re seeing, and answer the second question, we have to teach youse guys some history.

Left: shrouded (M16 typical); right: unshrouded (SP1 typical).

The original Armalite AR-10 and AR-15 were never designed to be semiautomatic rifles: from day one they were intended to be select-fire weapons, which was the global military preference of the 1950s, while these guns were in the earliest stages of development.

When Colt modified the AR-15 design to create a semiautomatic Sporter (which went to market in the mid-1960s as the AR-15 SP1), the ATF’s Firearms Technology Branch wanted Colt to make a weapon that was not readily conver

It takes all kinds to make a world, we always say, but what in the name of Niffelheim would motivate someone to take an airsoft gun to a school bus? Apparently, this guy went all road rage after kids in the bus flipped him off.

A Sanbornton man was charged after firing plastic pellets at two school buses on Wednesday, after the occupants reportedly directed obscene gestures toward him, Sanbornton police said.

Police arrested Tarance Piper, 24, and charged him with two misdemeanor counts of

reckless conduct and two misdemeanor counts of criminal threatening.
Police said the reports came in around 3 p.m. Wednesday of a vehicle following a school bus and firing an Airsoft-type gun at the bus. Airsoft guns are nonlethal and typically fire plasticpellets.
Winnisquam Superintendent Tammy Davis said the incident took place on Route 132 on the middle-high school run.

via Man arrested, charged with shooting plastic pellets at schoo

The best guide to future behavior is past behavior. Which is why we used to have a death penalty for guys like Patterson, here.

Quite literally in this case: the guy is a career criminal who was out on a suspended sentence for previous abuse of another child when he beat this one to death with a steel rod. He might actually go to jail this time.

Joseph Robert Patterson, 27, was arrested in the case and is expected to be charged in the coming days with aggravated assault and aggravated battery of an infant, in addition to murder.

Police said Patterson hit the boy in the head with a steel rod. Paramedics found the child in grave condition.

The boy died at 11:43 a.m. at Sanford USD Medical Center in Sioux Falls after being removed from life support, Lincoln County State’s Attorney Tom Wollman said.

Pa

The bruises may be explained by the fact that Oswald not only murdered President Kennedy, but also a Dallas police office, J.D. Tippett, in a separate incident. Under teh circumstances, the Dallas cops showed remarkably professional restraint in bringing him in alive.

We have long believed in the radical, minority-held idea that President John F. Kennedy (whose assassination, and the subsequent events, form some of our earliest memories) was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, and that nobody put Oswald up to it; he was just a loser with a lot of screwy modalities of thinking. His love for Cuba, and his unrequited love for the Soviet Union, don’t make the case that he was under their control; he always seemed too flaky to be trusted with anything, let alone anything big. Indeed, we’ve often speculated that numbe

From last weekend’s Knob Creek night shoot. MGs, SMGs, assault rifles (real assault rifles on full-auto), and even a minigun that comes rollicking in at the six minute point or so.

It’s like the FPL from hell. 1.25 million tracer-heavy rounds go downrange. Introduced (unobtrusively) by Chris Cheng. It’s fun just to leave in a browser tab and let the audio play. For some venues that may be NSFW, of course.

Hat tip: Accurate Shooter Daily Bulletin. (main link, for daily shooting news heavy on accuracy tech) (this post, for when it inevitably scrolls off the Bulletin’s front page).

You need a Kindle, or the Kindle App to read this (at least for free. There’s a paper book, too, but you have to pay for that. We did).

This is the first of Matt Bracken’s three-volume Enemies Foreign and Domestic trilogy… and it’s free (for what’s left of this week, we believe).

http://www.amazon.com/Enemies-Foreign-Domestic-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B004JF4L98/

We remember when Matt was writing this, his first novel. It has some great characters and some clever ideas moving it forward. In some ways, it does show its Clinton-era roots. The idea behind the book is simple: a group of rogue ATF agents stage a violent crime in order to grow their agency. (It seemed pretty far-fetched when he wrote it. After the Gunwalker scandal, where ATF agents and managers staged hundreds of crimes including the murders of other Federal agents, it doesn’t seem so far out). The ATF’s push creates a gueril

Usually, these kinds of things report some action by a brain-dead criminal. But in this case, the brain-dead is the “Bundeskriminalamt,” literally, Federal Criminal Office. With a name like that, you might be excused for thinking it’s some kind of bizarre German hiring hall where EU-supported criminals go to collect their subsidy checks. But it’s actually, German speakers know, the federal criminal investigative agency — Germany’s analog for our FBI, and the inheritor of the fine tradition of German police agencies such as the Geheime Staatspolizei and the Staatssicherheitsdienst.

In Germany, every time the Reds (socialists) or Greens (even more social than that) get in, they crack down (just like their American counterparts) on lawful civilian gun possession. For example, the last Red-Green coalition attacked inheritance as the presumed root of Europe’s crime problem, and made it difficult to inherit the old man’s firearms when he goes into his rented grave. And the BKA (Bundeskriminalamt; even Germans find German compound words a mouthful, and use acronyms) has powers that the American FBI and ATF

AP’s Adam Goldman: SEALs are thieves, pirates are victims.

The smug mug you see opposite belongs to one Adam Goldman of the Associated Press, a man who never served in the military and doesn’t think much of those who do or have done. You might think that the SEALS who whacked the pirates and rescued the hostage were heroes. Not Adam Goldman, who went to the University of Maryland (oooooh!). Goldman thinks that they’re thieves, and he wants you to think that, but he isn’t man enough to do more than lay the innuendo down for you:

It was an unbelievable story, with a new retelling that hits the big screen Friday with Tom Hanks playing Capt. Richard Phillips. But the official version that unfolded in the Indian Ocean wasn’t as tidy as Hollywood’s, or the versions in Phillips’ own book or in contemporaneous news reports. In fact, many more than three

No.

Were you expecting any other answer? No, a thousand times no. But if you reframe the question, there may be some benefit in learning something from an online gunsmithing school.

The come-ons are strong: “If you can watch TV, you can become a certified gunsmith in as little as three months, by watching one DVD a day, in the privacy of your home!” one of them tells you. This kind of thing puts real gunsmiths’ teeth on edge; they’re quick to blame these schools for the proliferation of Bubba The Gunsmith hackery, that sooner or later winds up on a pro’s bench to be repaired properly — or parted out.

There are at least two online schools offering, basically, instant gunsmithing by internet: Penn-Foster and the American Gunsmithing Institute. Both are for-profit schools.

We recently had the opportunity to review scores of online and video courses produced by both gunsmithing schools. Both do teach you valuable information and provide you with a certificate that is, as they say, suitable for framing.

There are some differences between the schools. Penn-Foster’s course is simpler, less expensive, and much less well promoted. It is primarily taught from books in online, .pdf format. Here’s a sample lesson, on

Rheault as commander of, we believe, 1st SFG(A), circa 1968.

COL Robert B. Rheault, who was one of the most respected, and most mistreated, commanders in Special Forces history, passed away today (16 Oct 13) at 1100. He was 87 years old and leaves a wife, two daughters and a son; his first wife passed away in 2006. This obituary is written primarily from memory and may be subject to revision.

COL Rheault was a member of the Class of 1946 at the United States Military Academy, where his friends and classmates included George S. Patton III, who would also serve in Vietnam and retire as a Major General. Like Patton, Rheault came from a well-to-do family; he, too, might have  worn stars, even though he had committed to Special Forces, then an infantry officer’s career-killer. Rheault held the key commands for a Special Forces officer during the Vietnam war: he led the 1st Special Forces Group on Okinawa in

Just how accurate is a .50 caliber rifle? The Fifty Caliber Shooters Association can tell you. The world record, set in 2009 by Lee Rasmussen, is a 5-shot group of 1.955″. Before you say “better than 2 MOA, that’s not bad,” that’s not a 100-yard group. That’s a thousand yard group! It works out, they tell us, to 0.1868 MOA. (Note: this is disputed in the comments, where Greg who did the math comes up with 0.1867 — a difference of one ten-thousandth of a minute of angle, perhaps, but math is math and correct is correct – Eds).

(The only .50 we’ve shot, a pre-M107 Barret M82A1, was a 2 MOA gun with match ammo, which we usually didn’t have. It was minute-of-general-neighborhood with ball ammo).

By the way,

William Lewis, the El Kabong of Rockland County, NY.

Yep, a guitar. And a light bulb. And an electric cord. It’s amazing that people can just walk into Guitar Center, Lowe’s and Walmart and buy these weapons of mass destruction. On the plus side, the truculent-looking fellow in the mugshot next to these words, who deployed all those improvised weapons, didn’t kill the guy. But on the minus side, it wasn’t for lack of effort: he left him in a coma, and when the victim recovered from that, with a permanent disability.

NEW CITY – Rockland County [New York -Ed.] resident William Lewis, who hit a neighbor a guitar, stabbed him with a broken light bulb and tried to strangle him with a cord during a robbery attempt, has been found guilty of attempted murder.

The attack left the victim in a coma for two weeks and with permanent vision loss.

A Rockland County jury on Tuesday found

Helo Watch by SFC Darrold Peters, US Army, 2006. Inspired by a photograph.

Since time immemorial, artists have followed warring armies to report and interpret their actions. Ancient Greek warriors found themselves stylized on amophorae and urns. We once featured World War I combat scenes painted by then-unknown German dispatch carrier, Gefreiter Adolf Hitler.

Since the start of the GWOT, the Army (and, we think, the other services) has sponsored artists working in several media, as a way to record the rich history of Army units on the battlefield, just as has been done before. The result is Army Artists Look at the War on Terrorism.

A project of the Army’s Center for Military History, it can be accessed as a .pdf or as individual files online. It’s a free download; the .pdf make