Weapons Man

This was a holiday and travel week combined, and while we held up our end apart from taking Thanksgiving off (all right: we held up our end until Saturday, where we didn’t post the Matinee and this on time), we saw a considerable defection of readers in the site stats… which we certainly hope was occasioned by you guys doing analog stuff with live human families.

Tom Hanks is Jim Donovan, a lawyer who handles insurance disputes. Donovan is good at it: personal injury lawyers and tort lawyers know that most of these cases will never see a trial, and they start with a good idea of how the settlement will look, but Donovan is good at negotiations. It is a skill that will soon have national importance.

Wacky Jackie Patrick — the murderous wife

The face of evil. No, not Cruella DeVil (although the error is excusable), this is crooked Kimberly Graves taking the Fifth in front of the Senate.

SARCO is celebrating Thanksgiving with some deals, but also has dug back into the warehouse and found some Bren Gun kits. These have not been on the market much lately. The good news is that two of these old torch demils include original barrels:

We’ll cover the usual subjects: Guns, Usage and Employment, Cops ‘n’ Crims, Unconventional (and current) Warfare, and Lord Love a Duck!

Now it’s ICE’s turn to cover for a negligent agent.

Just a couple of lines tell the whole story:

Investigators on the site of the mishap that killed two M18 Hellcat Gun Motor Carriage restorers.

Earlier this week, we visited Project Guns, a small manufacturer in Florida and the home of an interesting project to recreate the Communist Bloc RPD light machine gun. The RPD is the 7.62 x 39 mm squad automatic weapon used by Soviet, satellite and “fraternal socialist” armies and “national liberation movements” from the 1950s through the 1970s. It’s a gas-operated, belt-fed truly light machine gun that evolved from the ancient pan-fed DP through the DPM and DP-46 from Degtyaryev; the RPD, Ruchnoi Pulemyot Degtyaryeva, was, in keeping with its intermediate cartridge, smaller, lighter, and handier.

While this website does not appear to have been updated since 2007, in other words, in eight years, it still contains a great deal of useful information.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you. To our foreign readers (apart from Canadians, who have their own Canadian Thanksgiving custom, but at a different date), the last Thursday in November is the day that has been set aside for giving thanks for all our blessings, in the tradition of some of our earliest white settlers at Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, did after surviving the winter of 1620-21. They probably survived in part because they landed in such an austere area that the local Indians, insted of stomping the settleent out, made common cause with the newcomers, because they were barley surviving, too.

Before we start commenting, we’ll just direct you to the plain unvarnished facts. (Well, as reported by the media. There is that).

USSF officer Doug O’Connell from SOD-A with African officers, Flintlock 2015.

Something about the way a Glock’s nylon parts interact with a Dremel, a woodburning tool, or a soldering iron, seems to bring out the best beast in Bubba. For example, we had the infamous “stricken with Gleprosy” Glock we described as “a marital aid for a Komodo lizard” back in May, 2014:

In the history of firearms, one of the obscure yesterday’s “weapons of tomorrow” whose morrow never dawned was the Dardick “tround” (triangular round) system. The idea was for the weapon to use special trounds, or tround adapters that took a round of conventional fixed ammunition — .38 Special, for the standard Dardick, although an attempt was made at a .50 Dardick gun for aircraft usage. There was also a triplex tround.

Chelsea Ake-Salvacion, poster girl for cryotherapy. It cured her of all her problems.

We’ve mentioned before that long before the US decided it needed vehicles that could survive mines (or, technically, whose crews could survive mines — one mine FOOM and anything that came on its own wheels is leaving on something else’s). the Rhodesian Army invented, developed, and mastered the concept, on a shoestring budget.

Here’s a firearm you might not have seen, unless you’ve been to the National Firearms Museum in Virginia. It looks very familiar, at least to deer hunters of a certain vintage, but a little… well, different.