Seems that a couple decades of dishonest fearmongering on the part of the hoplophobes isn’t working:
Most Now Oppose an Assault Weapons Ban
Dec 162015
Dec 162015
I was reminded of the AGM-129 Advance Cruise Missile today, which reminded me of the small heavily illustrated booklet on the AGM-129 I put together a few years ago. It’s probably not too late to buy a couple hundred of these as Christmas presents for your friends and family. Here’s a retread of the original post from Back Then:
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Literally years in the making, I’ve put together two versions of a photo essay of several surviving examples of the AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile. Available free for the downloading is Stagger Around #3: AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile, Abridged Edition as a 13 page PDF booklet. This contains photos of the AGM-129s on display at Hill Aerospace Museum in Utah, the USAF Museum in Dayton and the Strategic Air & Space Museum in Nebraska, ready to print.
Also available is Stagger Around #3: AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile, Full Edition. This 34-page edition includes more photos of these missiles, along with the missile at the San Diego Aerospace Museum restoration facility, a rare General Dynamics display model, official USAF photos of the AGM-129 in test and in service and drawings of the missile, including 1/32 scale layout diagrams. This is available through MagCloud, either as a downloadable PDF ($5.75) or as a professionally printed and bound edition ($11.80).
Don’t forget to check out my other MagCloud publications, including Justo Miranda’s Reichdreams Dossiers, Aerospace Projects Review, Historical Documents, and Photographing Stuff.
And don’t forget to check out Stagger Around #1, F-104A Starfighter, and Stagger Around #2, Starship Enterprise.
NOTE:
If you liked this and want to see more like it… feel free to toss fifty cents, a buck, a hundred bucks, whatever, my way. Think of it as a donation to a worthy cause. Or a bribe. Whatever you’re more comfortable with.
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When I originally put this out in 2012, the PDF version was orderable through MagCloud. If anyone wants to order it straight from here like most of my other stuff, let me know.
Dec 102015
From the same kid what who dun brung us the drone with a pistol, comes a drone with a flamethrower:
Dec 072015
For the last week or so, the news media, entertainment media and internet have been loaded down with claims that America has had more mass shootings in 2015 than 2015 has had days. This, of course, sounds pretty bad, and is a factoid being used by the civilian disarmament movement to further their cause of restricting firearms solely to agents of the government and violent criminals. But is the claim accurate?
Surprise, surprise, it’s not.
The Media’s Inflated ‘Mass Shootings’ Count Is Wildly Misleading
Basically, the definition of “mass shooting” had to be badly mangled in order to get the numbers they were after. The definition being used here is that in a single incident of gunfire, four or more people are injured or killed. Note, though, that it’s not four people injured by the shooter shooting them. Nor four people being injured by being shot. or, indeed, *anybody* being shot. Injuries such as bystanders running away, tripping and skinning their knee? They’re counted. The shooter himself gets shot by a cop, or beat half to death by a bystander, or shoots himself? He’s counted.
The number being trotted out is 355 mass shootings in 2015. The Congressional Research Service defines:
“mass public shooting” is a mass shooting “in at least one or more public locations, such as a workplace, school, restaurant, house of worship, neighborhood, or other public setting . . . and not attributable to any other underlying criminal activity or commonplace circumstance (armed robbery, criminal competition, insurance fraud, argument, or romantic triangle).” Using these definitions, Grant Duwe, in his 2007 book Mass Murder in the United States: A History, notes: “Excluding those that occurred in connection with criminal activity such as robbery, drug dealing, and organized crime, there were 116 mass public shootings during the twentieth century” (emphasis mine). The Congressional Research Service reported 317 mass shootings between 1999 and 2013, only 66 of which qualified under their criteria as mass public shootings.
According to this metric, there were fewer mass shootings in *14* *years* than is now being claimed for 2015.
However you count ’em, a mass public shooting is a Very Bad Thing. But some in the civilian disarmament movement are claiming that the US is somehow unique in this, that we are virtually alone in having mass shootings. But, surprise, surprise, this isn’t accurate either.
Comparing Death Rates from Mass Public Shootings and Mass Public Violence in the US and Europe
How dangerous is the US as far as mass shootings? Not very, compared to some Enlightened European Nations:
And how *often* do mass shootings happen in the US, compared to other nations?
Note that according to this data, the annual chances of an American being killed in a mass shooting is less than one in ten million. Sure, other countries might have lower risk, say, one in forty million. But one in ten million is such a vanishingly low number compared to other causes of death that stressing out about it, or allowing demagogues to mangle civil rights, just doesn’t make sense.
Here’s what you need to know about “gun control:”
Dec 042015
Dec 032015
A video describing a Mauser bolt-action rifle with a factory modification: a periscope. This would allow the shooter to stick the rifle up above a trench and shoot at the enemy without putting his own noggin into the field of fire. Looks incredibly cumbersome, but under the circumstances, it’s better than getting shot. A modern version would be something like a webcam that clips to your rifles optics and runs down to a small screen or something like a militarized Google Glass. That would have the advantage of not only being far less cumbersome, but also lighter, cheaper and with the ability to aim any which way, including around corners.
Nov 152015
Here’s a firearm I’ve never seen before: the French “Union” pistol dating from the 1930’s. The pistol itself is fairly conventional; where it’s different is the 35-round magazine, bent into a horseshoe shape. The far end of the magazine simply fits up against the underside of the pistol frame. Manufacturing quality is apparently high. This was a select-fire .32, justifying the large magazine capacity. Not explained: how you holster the thing.
Nov 132015
Car bomb in Iraq caught on video…
Nov 112015
Hmmm…
Putin TV: Russia’s Got a Dirty Bomb
A Kremlin-owned TV network broadcast footage of a meeting with Putin, with the camera looking over someone’s shoulder and getting a clear image of a page in a report detailing a design of a submarine-deployed “dirty bomb” designed to reduce American coastal cities to radioactive wastelands. Supposedly the Russian government had a conniption and censored the image from later airings.
The question is:
1) Is this what it presents itself as, with the Russians developing such a weapons system and somehow mistakenly letting it slip onto the air?
2) is it disinformation, intentionally aired in order to… what? Make people in coastal cities freak out for some reason?
The page in question:
Apparently this is a translation:
“Ocean Multipurpose System Status-6” and “Developer—Rubin Design Bureau.” And, below that, some explanatory text and illustrations.
“Purpose—the defeat of the important economic facilities in the area of the enemy coast,” the text reads, “and causing unacceptable damage to… the country through the establishment of extensive zones of radioactive contamination, unsuitable for implementation in these areas of military, economic, business or other activity for a long time.”
The design appears to be a large torpedo with a large nuke in the nose. It appears that it’d be slung underneath the carrying sub rather than carried within it.
Whether or not this is a real project or just the usual Putinesque disinformation, it does point out an important difference between the US and Russia: the US has a *lot* of it’s industry, economy and population in coastal cities, Russia does not. This means that America is more vulnerable to attack from the sea; a cargo ship with a nuke in the hold, or a nuclear “mine” lurking offshore big enough to make a good tsunami, can trash a city… but only a coastal city.
Oct 292015
Daily Fail, so…
Shotguns have ‘virtually sold out’ in Austria as citizens rush to buy arms amid fears of a massive influx of migrants, dealers claim
Supposedly there are 900,000 privately owned guns in Austria; 70,000 of which have been sold – largely to women – in the last year. Claim is made that the force driving this is nervousness over the influx of “refugees” from down south.
If I understand the article correctly, rifles have essentially sold out in the Czech Republic.
This seems to be the source of info for the DMs article: