Currently being sold on ebay is a display model of a missile, a “Martin ASM.” ASM almost certainly means “Air to Surface Missile,” but otherwise there’s no further info. Seller seems to think it’s related to the Assault Breaker project, but it looks vaguely like a Skybolt-ish air-launched ballistic missile.
Manufacturing the 1911: not exactly brain surgery.
Are they built to proper specifications, using proper materials, properly heat treated? Nope. Will it put a bullet in a target? Almost certainly. Quite possibly several hundred times before something breaks.
A good video to see the differences. Fortunately they use multiple camera angles with good slow motion. Clearly visible is just *how* the bump stock works… and just how much the bullets are sprayed all over from the bump stocked AR-15 compared to the relative stability of the true full auto M-16.
This piece seems to be reasonably well reasoned, and if you are a left-winger or an anti-gunner, or if you know one, I’d suggest giving it a read.
As the title suggests, six reasons are given. But I think the first one is perhaps one of the most important:
The most destructive, divisive response when dealing with Second Amendment advocates is the notion that we aren’t on your side of the issue because we “don’t care” about the tragedy and loss of life. Two years ago at Christmas I had a family member, exasperated that I wasn’t agreeing about gun control, snarl, “It appears that if your [step] daughter was killed because of gun violence you wouldn’t even care!”
Me, I’m a jerk. I’ve long since ceased to really care about convincing people who disagree with me to agree with me, because to a large degree politics has become so stultifyingly polarized that no matter what evidence is produced that there isn’t some phantom wage gap, or that nuclear power is the way to go, or that the United States isn’t the greatest evil in world history, or that the world is more than 6,000 years old or that vaccines aren’t going to give you autism or that a firearm I own isn’t going to jump up and shoot you or that maybe you should be allowed to keep what you earn and control your own stuff and destiny, there will be people who just will not accept it. A few decades of these fights have largely drained the hope from me that many people are even open to understanding anything that even comes close to libertarianism or conservativism or a rational scientific outlook. So I just throw the occasional bomb onto my blog and call it a day.
But if you actually hold out the hope of convincing The Other Side of your viewpoint, coming at them right out of the gate with “you don’t care about victims” is *exactly* the wrong approach. And for two reasons:
1: If the other guy doesn’t believe that you believe what you’re saying, he knows you to be a dishonest and disreputable liar.
2: If the other guy *does* believe what you say when you declare that he doesn’t care about actual victims, he’s going to assume that *you* are the actual sociopath in the situation.
And somethgin that has coem up in the comments section of this blog many times is also discussed:
We really, really don’t.
We don’t.
Most Americans give precisely zero shits about “but everyone else in the world does X.” Whether “X” is:
We really, really don’t. Sure, some do, but we tend to sequester them in Hollywood where we can point at them and laugh.
So after the Mandalay Bay Massacre, the usual pack of political ghouls are pushing for a ban on “military style assault weapons” (i.e. guns that function) and “high capacity (i.e. standard) magazines. But they’re also going after bump stocks… simple bits of plastic that turn perfectly adequate semiautomatic rifles into high firing rate inaccurate bullet hoses. The usefulness of the latter for preventing future crimes is dubious. The sole purpose of a bump stock is to *legally* simulate full auto; if you want full auto and don’t care about legality, modifying your firearm is generally easy enough. Bump stocks just made it a little bit easier. If bump stocks suddenly vanished, criminals wanting full auto capability would simply modify their weapons some other way.
But if bump stocks went away and criminals decided they *really* wanted bump stocks, how hard would it be for them to make their own? As it turns out… not that hard.
Or even easier:
Which results in this:
These are just regular schmoes, making these things for the entertainment value. Imagine what actual criminals can do.
Or just wrap a rubber band around the trigger:
So, someone opened fire on a vast music festival crowd on the Vegas Strip with a fully automatic weapon. So far, two dead, 24 wounded; the police report that the shooter is dead. The videos I’ve seen on CNN seem to indicate that the shooter fired a magazine, reloaded, fired another magazine, reloaded, emptied a third. Hard to tell how many rounds were fired, but if those were standard capacity thirty round mags, that’s 90 rounds. One quick lesson to learn here: full auto is an inefficient way to carry out a massacre… 90 rounds shot into a crowd with something like ~30 people shot.
UPDATE: the police just issued a statement… at least *20* dead, 100 injured. A good chance that a number of the dead & injured weren’t shot, but trampled. They know who the shooter was, but are so far refusing to ID him, other than he was a local. They are looking for one Marilou Danley. I’ve already seen internet sleuthery that has located the online info about one such woman and her very leftist -apparent-husband (who the net-sleuths have determined based on nothing that he is the shooter), but given the poor track record of such things (recall the Charlottesville initial reporting), it is at best unwise to start pointing at individuals based on just a name.
ANOTHER UPDATE: 50+ dead, 200+ injured. Shooter ID’ed as one Stephen C. Paddock. Looks like this is the worst mass shooting in US history.
OK, so, now comes the time for rampant unsubstantiated speculating for political purposes. The weapon was full auto, which is an unusual occurrence; was it a legal full auto weapon, shot by the owner or someone who procured a stolen one? Was it an illegally modified semi-auto? Was it a legally modified bump-fire conversion, or some sort of crank-fired gun? The gunfire *seems* to be slightly variable in rate of fire, so maybe the latter.
The shooter is reportedly dead, and reportedly alone. So was the shooter a lone whackjob? Was he a Trump supporting white supremacist… shooting into a crowd of country music loving white folks for some reason? An Antifa/BLM anti-Trumper/anti-white-folk terrorist? An ISIS supporter? This being Vegas, other options are available. Was he some guy who was perfectly fine a day or two ago, but went to Vegas for a fun weekend and wound up losing his lifes fortune playing the slots and it drove him over the edge? Some guy who’s upset about the Reptilian Conspiracy (again, this is Vegas)?
My unwarranted speculation: not a jihadi. This shooting was carried out at some considerable distance; jihadis seem to prefer to kill people up close and personal.
Right now there are a *lot* of people saying “please don’t be one of mine, please don’t be one of mine…” And when the identity of the shooter is released, there will be a lot of people going “Yay, ammunition I can use against my political opponents!” and lots of people going “Damn, I can’t use that.”
Apropos of nothing: CNN is interviewing a lot of people who were on the scene, as you’d expect. And a *lot* of them seem to be Canadians. Is Vegas particularly popular among Canucks?
In a win for gun rights advocates, a federal appeals court on Thursday decided to let stand a ruling that found it is unconstitutional to require firearms owners prove a “good reason” in order to be permitted to carry a concealed handgun in the nation’s capital.
While it’s good news and a step in the right direction, it’s insane that it was a necessary step in the first place. Imagine if some municipality put a rule in place that in order to vote you needed to show a “good reason.” Or even to drive… which, unlike bearing arms is a *privilege,* not a right.
The case is now likely to go to the Supreme Court. Chances are good that if it does so, reason will continue to prevail. And here is a case where it makes sense to recognize one of Trumps few true successes. imagine in Clinton had installed her own Supreme Court justice rather than Gorsuch. Shudder.
Something the FedGuv needs to do is end the nonsense of allowing political regions (cities, counties, states, whatever) to not recognize another districts CCW license. Again, witness the drivers license… or the marriage certificate.
Woopsie. A statue commemorating Mikhail Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47, was unveiled in Moscow this week. Looks like a good statue. At the base of the stature there’s a sculpted “exploded view” diagram of the AK-47. Well… of the German StG 44, in fact, not the AK-47. They look similar to be sure, but they are not the same. And once that mistake was discovered, they delicately chopped the diagram off with an angle grinder. The link above shows the before and after photos.
This sort of screwup is not as uncommon as you might hope. Sometime circa 1994 I attended the unveiling of a veterans memorial on (or near, I forget exactly) Rock Island Arsenal. It consisted of polished black marble slabs, one for each war on up to the Persian Gulf War. Each slab had “art” laser or chemically etched into the surface; pictures rather than actual sculpture. I had a difficult time not making a scene when I realized that the Persian Gulf War slab showed what was *supposed* to be an AH-64 Apache, but was actually an Agusta A129 Mangusta, an Italian attack helicopter that the US military most assuredly did *not* use in Iraq.
This is also not an AK-47. Or is it? Hmmm…
So where are the statues of Eugene Stoner, Edward Teller and John Moses Browning? I suggest for every statue of Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee taken down, they be replaced with prominent American weapons designers.
You really want to impress the guys? Mount a 105 mm Howitzer in the back of your truck. Giggity!
It uses a special recoil dampening system that works well enough to allow the cannon to be mounted in the bed of a Ford F-250 pickup truck (seems to work about like the Howitzer proposed for helicopter use in the early 70’s).
The idea is to create a system mobile enough to fire off a few shots and then pack up and leave before counter-battery fire comes raining down. Seems to me, though, to really make the system work well it needs to have an autoloader with a magazine of four or more rounds and, preferably, the ability to fire either on the move, or within a few seconds of stopping, and then to get back moving again within a second or two.
Hold muh beer. BLAMMO!
Just the thing to trigger the snowflakes:
Sadly, the polling size is small, only 1,200, so it seems likely to be iifyly accurate. Still, it indicates 120 million armed Americans.
