Heh.
If he *really* wanted to make money, he would have started an ammunition company. But that would require actually doing work and turning out a quality product reliably, on time and in appropriate quantities. A vaporware pillow company, on the other hand, only needs to bring in a lot of initial investment. After that? Well… who knows.
A guy wanted in Texas was arrested near the Vice Presidents residence in D.C. The police said he had “AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, 113 rounds of unregistered ammunition, and five 30 round magazines.” Now, beyond the head-scratcher that is “unregistered ammunition,” there’s this small detail: the gun and ammo were in his car… “parked in a garage several miles away near the Washington Convention Center.”
Ummm… he was going to assassinate someone using a gun *miles* away?
But hey. Conveniently just in time for those all-important gun control bills, amiright?
A photo of a piece of art that was on eBay some months ago:
This probably dates from the 70’s or perhaps early 80’s… no air launched cruise missiles, no Peacekeeper, no Trident.
It has been illegal for the better part of a century for American citizens to sell fully automatic weapons without “proper” NFA licensing. One can argue that this is unConstitutional (and it clearly is), but it is nevertheless the law. If you make an Uzi in your home shop and sell it… you’re going to get a visit from the ATF.
But the ATF has also decided that selling *drawings* of components for automatic weapons is also a Federal offense. I look forward to the ACLU jumping all over this for the obvious First Amendment implications. Sure. Aaaaannnnny day now.
The ATF raided and arrested Kristopher Justin Ervin, 41, of Jacksonville, FL, for manufacturing machine guns. Ervin did not sell or make any firearms. … The autokey card did have a drawing of a lightning link on the surface, but it was far from finished. For a person to use the device in a gun, the end-user would have cut out the lightning link and bend the metal before they could use it in an AR15. The owner of the company did not even etch the lightning link on the piece of metal. It was just an outline.
Say, that’s neat. I’ve published diagrams of nuclear weapons. I can’t wait for the ATF to come knocking.
The ATF says that anyone who owns an auto keycard purchased from the site violates the National Firearms Act (NFA). The agency will charge anyone busted with the device with a federal felony. Gun owners can face ten years in prison, and a fine of up to $250,000 per device owned. Since most people purchased multiple cards, the penalties could add up and be very costly.
Say, that’s EXTRA neat. Did you buy a piece of art? Guess what: yer goin’ ta jail.
Ladies and gentlemen… here is your Federal government, protecting YOU from the dangers of artwork.
Art culturally appropriated from George Alexopoulos.
My father was an infantryman in Viet Nam in 65-66. His stories about his year there are… interesting. I believe the euphemism might be “character building,” though getting thrown around by RPGs and being lit up by Commies is the sort of opportunity to enrich one’s outlook on things that most people would probably wisely prefer to avoid. His experiences helped inform my own outlook on the undesirability of collectivist economics, given what it seems to inevitably leads to.
There are tales of air support… the AD-1 “Spad” came in handy and Spooky showed up from time to time to look like an ancient god of war. But he has mentioned that he would’ve liked to have seen the A-10 Warthog roll in to provide assistance. And who wouldn’t: the plane is incredibly badass. Were we not now in the era of expendable drones, I would heartily recommend revisiting the design and putting a modernized version of it back into production (along with, of course, the OV-10 Bronco). But the fact is the Warthog was a number of years too late to show up in Viet Nam, certainly far, far too late for my dad’s term of service there. Still… there’s this:
Had the A-10 been deployed to Viet Nam, it likely would have looked like this:
This one, while not very close up, shows a Spad alongside two Warthogs… one in Nam colors, the other done up in D-Day duds:
And a video of the three together:
https://www.facebook.com/A10DemoTeam/videos/242240330896452/
Senator Feinstein of California has introduced legislation to prohibit the manufacture and sale and transfer of common rifles and standard capacity magazines:
Feinsteins bill would graciously allow you to keep what you currently own… so long as you don’t move across state lines, probably. And when you die? The government gets your stuff because of course they do. And the police? They get to keep all the “assault weapons” they like.
BOHICA.
Just passed today in the House, H.R. 1446: “Enhanced Background Checks Act of 2021.”
Currently, if you buy a gun from a firearms dealer you need to complete a background check. Normally that takes a matter of seconds… your criminal record, if any, is in government computers and shouldn’t take but a split second to pull up. Current law gives the government three days to complete the check, for reasons which are inexplicable; as previously stated, it should take less time than it takes to google “background check.” Back when i lived in Utah, you could go to a gun store or a gun show, find what you wanted, fork over your cash, fill out your paperwork, wait a minute while the dealer calls up the FBI and gets the go ahead… then you collect your new firearm and wander away, a happy citizen.
But H.R. 1446 turns that maximum of three day waiting period into a *minimum* twelve day waiting period. From the summary of the bill:
This bill revises background check requirements applicable to proposed firearm transfers from a federal firearms licensee (e.g., a licensed gun dealer) to an unlicensed person.
Specifically, it increases the amount of time, from 3 business days to a minimum of 10 business days, that a federal firearms licensee must wait to receive a completed background check prior to transferring a firearm to an unlicensed person. (This type of transaction is often referred to as a default proceed transaction.)
If a submitted background check remains incomplete after 10 business days, then the prospective purchaser may submit a petition for a final firearms eligibility determination. If an additional 10 days elapse without a final determination, then the federal firearms licensee may transfer the firearm to the prospective purchaser.
This will largely end gun shows in free states like Utah, since customers will know that they will not be walking out with the product they want. And even for gun stores, the chances are good that it will take a full month (20 business days is four weeks for Monday through Friday… not counting the innumerable Federal holidays) before the bureaucrats get around to giving the go-ahead. It is a safe bet that this process will be used to slow down the firearms business as much as possible… the system that works just fine now in a matter of seconds will very likely be throttled to make sure that it takes as long as governmentally possible. Doubtless the post-ten-day petitioning process will be a nightmare… un-navigable websites, or the requirement to physically fill out paperwork that you can’t actually physically get. I can see the petitioning process requiring the gun buyer to send a physical letter to some distant Federal facility to request the paperwork; it’ll take days for the postal system to get the letter there, it’ll take days for the letter to get processed through the doubtless grossly overloaded front office staffed by people who were suspended from the DMV for working too slowly, it’ll take days more for the postal system to send the buyer the paperwork. Once received, the paperwork will be an incomprehensible mass of gobbledygook, a crummy novella of plot holes and spelling errors. The buyer will spend days trying to fill it out, collecting required data from sources around the country. The post office will spend more days sending it where it needs to go, to face another set of DMV rejects… who will be specially trained to find the flaws in the paperwork, the trick questions that either mean the paperwork is sent back to the petitioner to do over again (after a suitable waiting period)… or just outright rejected. That second ten-day waiting period refers to the period *after* the petition has been received. And it’s clearly possible for the Feds to make sure that it takes a buyer *weeks* to get the petition sent in. Hell, the easiest thing in the world for them to do is simply not set up a petition process. If there’s no way for you to petition… you *can’t* petition.
The lying authoritarian anti-American scumbags who sponsored this bill claim that it will “strengthen” the background check process.” They say this without explaining why the current system is somehow insufficient. The bill now goes to the Senate where it may or may not pass. If it does pass, obviously China’s best buddy will sign the bill into law. At that point a 120 day clock will start ticking down until the law comes into effect. By that point the $1400 “stimulus” payments should have been received. I hope everyone takes that money and that 120 days to go out and buy as many guns as possible.
Alternatively: use your stimulus funds to procure the hardware needed to machine proper firearms or firearm components. Ten people working together would have $12,000 worth of machine tools. I suspect that’s quite sufficient to set up a workshop that will convert plain blocks of aluminum, steel or even titanium into AR-15 receivers.
Once again, this time with feeling:
Sen. Johnson: “How many firearms were confiscated in the Capitol or on Capitol grounds during that day?”
FBIAssistant Director Sanborn: “To my knowledge, we have not recovered any on that day from any other arrests at the scene at this point. But I don’t want to speak on behalf of Metro and Capitol Police. But to my knowledge, none.”
Johnson: “So nobody has been charged with an actual firearm weapon in the Capitol or on Capitol grounds?”
Sanborn: “Correct. The closest we came was the vehicle that had the Molotov cocktails in it. And when we did a search of that vehicle later on, there was a weapon.”
Johnson: “How many shots were fired that we know of?”
Sanborn: “I believe the only shots that were fired were the ones that results in the death of the one lady” [The woman killed by the Capitol Police].
The fear-mongering bootlickers claim that the “armed insurrectionists” had things like stun guns and – GASP HORROR – crutches.
A video (made with a few contributions from yours truly, and, yes, attributed as such within the video) describing the 1970s Boeing design for an ICBM-carrying airliner, the MC-747. This is described and illustrated in US Bomber Projects issue 21, AVAILABLE HERE.
An interesting idea to be sure, but an unsafe one. Were one of these aircraft to go down for whatever reason, the results would be No Damned Good. Almost certainly the warheads would not go nuclear, but it’s always possible that the combo of the crash, the burning jet fuel and the solid rocket propellant merrily burning away might cause the chemical explosives in the warheads to go off, potentially scattering plutonium all over hither and yon. Worse still would be if the plutonium got sprinkled with the solid propellant and the plutonium combusted, scattering not just chunks and bits of plutonium, which would be bad enough, but clouds of plutonium oxide or plutonium chloride.
Perhaps more dangerous would be the Soviet reaction. They’d be in a constant state of freaking out every time one of these took to the sky, and they probably would have difficulty telling an MC-747 from an E-4 or a civilian 747. And, of course, they’d have to have their own. the AN-124 would be the logical choice for an ICBM carrier, and chances are good they’d do as good of a job with it as they did with Chernobyl, the Kursk or the Polyus.
From well before the B-58 program began, the Convair designers intended for their four-engined supersonic bomber to have a relatively gigantic pod underneath containing fuel and a nuke. The illustration below shows an early B-58 concept with the outboard engine nacelles located above the wing, together with a collection of potential bomb/fuel pods. “Freefall” contains an H-bomb; “Ferret” is electronic intelligence gathering; photo recon is obvious; and PPB is… hmmm. Note that none of these seem to have rockets in the tail, the ferret and photo recon pods doubtless were intended to return with the aircraft rather than be dropped.
