From the Evening Standard:
AN ALLEGED double killer, his accomplice and one of his victims were all carrying firearms at an anti-gun event in London, the Old Bailey heard today.
Shakah Anderson is accused of shooting dead Mohamed Korneh and Selorn Gbesenete, both 21, at the Tudor Rose night club in Southall at Unarmed 2, dedicated to stopping gun crime among young black people, the jury was told.
Clearly, the Brits need to close the Gun Control Rally Loophole. Think of the children!
For a limited time (until I delete it… ha!) Space Document 3, “The Story Of Peenemunde, Or What Might Have Been. is on sale for $7.50 to download. Normal price… $15.00. Get it while the gettin’s good!
The only place you’ll see this sale is this blog posting, so if you want in, click the “Add to Cart” below.
SALE IS OVER. You should have checked back sooner!
On display at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds Museum in Maryland was this unlabelled smallish tank. Any ideas?
I’ve been working with Justo Miranda to make his Dossiers available online as downloadable PDF files. Things are ready to go… nine of his dossiers are available for purchase right now, with the rest to come along soon (it takes a while to scan & prepare these publications, since I’m shooting for high quality). They are available for purchase via PayPal, and are currently *half* the price of the original paper editions. Soon the whole publication catalog will be available for purchase via Paypal, downloadable directly to your computer.
Previously difficult to come by, the “Reichdreams Dossiers” cover aspects of the designs of WWII German and Allied advanced aircraft and weapons projects, presenting them with high-quality diagrams, masterpieces of the draftsmans art. All issues are scanned at 300dpi, full-color or grayscale where appropriate, with images cleaned and color corrected for highest quality. Check back regularly – or request to be put on the e-mailing list – for updates.As of April 9, 2009, Dossiers # 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 20 are available.
http://www.up-ship.com/blog/drawndoc/rd/rd.htm
Gah. Self-fulfilling prophesy, here we come…
Police Chief Nate Harper said the motive for the shooting isn’t clear, but friends said the gunman recently had been upset about losing his job and feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.
Way to help the cause, dumbass. With the apparent upsurge in mass killings since the 0bama regime took over, it won’t be long before the Democrats in control of Congress gin up the nads to actually try to resurrect and “improve upon” the unConstitutional “Assualt Weapons Ban” and similar fascist anti-freedom travesties.
On CNN tonight, I saw a panel discussion with the usual ratio of talking heads… one weak-willed Republican, one angry Democrat, one anti-gun nut, and one anchor. So, three agaisnt one-half. The part that *really* grated was when there was general concensus that “maybe we should be more like Europe, because they’ve got restrictive gun laws and low gun crime.” Yeah, fine… except Europe has had freakin’ genocide within the last few years. I’ll stack America’s fairly constant murder rate up against Europes “no murder, no murder, no murder, massive land war that kill tens of millions, no murder, no murder, massive land and air war that kills a hundred million, no murder, no murder, guess what’s next” history.
European-style governance? No, thanks. Saw the movie, didn’t seem appealing.
From Fox News (thereby assuring that it will be discounted by the Left):
You’ve heard this shocking “fact” before — on TV and radio, in newspapers, on the Internet and from the highest politicians in the land: 90 percent of the weapons used to commit crimes in Mexico come from the United States.
Don’t know about y’all, but, yes, I’ve heard this rather a lot recently. The fact that Mexican governance is a farcical sham of entrenched corruption, coupled with America’s dumbass “war on drugs,” has led to some rather staggering violence not only on the border, but spilling over into American cities as Mexican drug gangs battle each other, cops and regular citizens for dominance. “90% of their guns came from America” has been a popular talking point among left-wing journalists, more journalists, yet more journalists, politicians, screeching harpies and California Fascists since this started making the news a few months back. And why not? It’s a Scary Statistic that will help them to ram through yet more unConstitutional anti-gun restrictions (a goal that’s not even faintly disguised… many are quite open about it). Small problem: apparently that statistic, like so many thrown about by politicians, is utter rubbish, produced by quote-mining and “data enrichment.”
In 2007-2008, according to ATF Special Agent William Newell, Mexico submitted 11,000 guns to the ATF for tracing. Close to 6,000 were successfully traced — and of those, 90 percent — 5,114 to be exact, according to testimony in Congress by William Hoover — were found to have come from the U.S.
But in those same two years, according to the Mexican government, 29,000 guns were recovered at crime scenes.
In other words, 68 percent of the guns that were recovered were never submitted for tracing. And when you weed out the roughly 6,000 guns that could not be traced from the remaining 32 percent, it means 83 percent of the guns found at crime scenes in Mexico could not be traced to the U.S.
It’s not hard for someone who is either dimwitted or uninterested in facts to squeeze “90% of the guns came from the US” out of that. Sadly, laws are being passed by the dimwitted and those uninterested in facts, at a staggeringly accelerated clip since late January.
And there’s this:
The Mexican government said it has seized 2,239 grenades in the last two years — but those grenades and the rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) are unavailable in U.S. gun shops. The ones used in an attack on the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey in October and a TV station in January were made in South Korea. Almost 70 similar grenades were seized in February in the bottom of a truck entering Mexico from Guatemala.
Anybody who thinks that Mexican criminals who are able to get grenades – including RPGs – from non-US sources, but would somehow be stymied for regular firearms if the US suddenly enacted draconian and unConstitutional gun laws… is an idiot.
What an idiot may look like:
From the Scotish Sunday Herald:
PLANS TO refurbish Trident nuclear weapons had to be put on hold because US scientists forgot how to manufacture a component of the warhead, a US congressional investigation has revealed.
The US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) “lost knowledge” of how to make a mysterious but very hazardous material codenamed Fogbank. ….
Neither the NNSA nor the UK Ministry of Defence would say anything about the nature or function of Fogbank. But it is thought by some weapons experts to be a foam used between the fission and fusion stages of a thermonuclear bomb. US officials have said that manufacturing the material requires a solvent cleaning agent which is “extremely flammable” and “explosive”. The process also involves dealing with “toxic materials” hazardous to workers.
I wish I could say this sort of thing was rare, but it’s disturbingly common. I’ve seen it multiple times in my own career. My favorite incident occured one day when I was sitting bored out of my mind in my cubicle at ATK , and the phone rang. It was someone from elsewhere on the plant; they were having a problem with a coating for some igniter components for a rocket program that ATK inherited from United Tech, when United Tech went under in 2004. The instructions to make the coating came with the rocket, but no matter what they did, the techs couldn’t actually make the stuff. By this point, United Tech near San Jose had been abandoned, and the buildings bulldozed. There was nobody there to ask anymore. But someone found that I had worked there, so they called me up in hopes that I might have been in touch with a former co-worker who knew something, *anything,* about this particular program. When they explained the coating issue to me, they had to wait a minute or so for me to stop laughing.
As it happens, *I* was the one who had cooked up that coating at Untied Tech. I was one of two guys working this issue there; it was the other fellers program, I was providing assistance. Shortly after we got the coating to work, he left United Tech. And apparently he left before all the paperwork could be updated. So the techs at ATK knew what most (but not all) of the ingredients for the coating were, but not the manufacturing process. And there were a grand total of two people on the entire friggen’ planet who could tell them how to fix it. And through sheer dumb luck, they managed to find one of them right off the bat. But if I hadn’t worked there, or if nobody had thought to call me, Odin only knows how many taxpayer-funded manhours would have been blown trying to figure out how to make a coating that this other feller and I whipped up in about 15 minutes.
Heh.
Good luck with “Fogbank.”
So I publish APR and sell aerospace documents, in no small part to help make sure that not all this knowledge is lost.
Went to Ogden today (caught “Watchmen,” I thought it was good). While there I hit “Sportsmans Warehouse.” A few notes:
1) They used to have a big, big display of pistols available for sale. They now have maybe a dozen.
2) They used to have a lot of “assault rifles.” Today they had two.
3) They had no 9mm ammo. Almost out of all the other pistol calibers. Shockingly, that had almost no .22.
4) They had hunting shotguns out the wazoo.
I don’t know what things are like in other states, but it’s looking like Utahns are gearing up for a fight. So perhaps Obama really is going to bring us all together in unity…
From the Danbury, CT, News-Times:
An arsenal?? Oh noes!!!
What vast collection of arms did this dastardly youngster have? Did he have, perchance, enough firepower to arm a Marine Corps batallion? Dod he have enough firearms to hold off a zombie invasion? Was the truck filled to capacity with arms? Let’s find out…
A search of the truck revealed:
A Bushmaster rifle with a night scope and pistol grip.
Two high capacity ammunition magazines.
A Remington 12-gauge shotgun with additional ammo.
Five knives
Brass knuckles
A bulletproof vest with an armor plate.
Wait. This “arsenal” was two guns, a set of brass knuckles and some knives??? None of these are illegal weapons as set forth by the US Constitution (as backed up by the USSC’s Miller and Heller decisions); only in the minds of some corrupt politicians in some backwards states are these bannable items.
And the topper is that this story, at least as I’m writing this, is the lead news item on the News-Times website. Some kid going to show off some of his toys to his friends is turned into a Major News Item by yellow journalists looking to scare people with claims of an “arsenal.”
Bah.
See, this is one of the bigger reasons why I’m glad I moved away from the east coast. There’s many days when my little econobox would be substantially better armed than that… and I’m just going to get groceries.
An illustration from 1985 or before showing the weapons loads that the B-1B could carry. Note the row of weapons on middle-left: 38 AIM-54 Phoenix air-to-air missiles. Presumably this was meant to show that the B-1B could serve as a flying “picket ship,” spending extended durations orbiting some area – borders, or perhaps maritime patrol – and ready to unleash long-range whoopass on Soviet bomber or fighter fleets. A less likely possibility is that the B-1B could serve as an “escort fighter” for other B-1’s as they penetrate deep into Soviet territory. This idea was tried in WWII with the YB-40 and the XB-41 “escort bombers,” with bombs removed and additional machine gun emplacement added; results were dismal. Thus I doubt the “B-1 Escort Bomber” concept. But if anybody knows for sure, feel free to speak up.
