If a country has a coup and their military overthrows a democratically elected leader, by law the US cannot provide military aid to them. Unless, it seems, the US government just *wants* to provide military aid…
If I remember my “Scooby Doo” correctly, there is profit to be made by trying to scare off property owners – or prospective property buyers – by dressing up like a ghost pirate and making them think the place is haunted. While that certainly seems a fine, foolproof sort of plan, a new wrinkle has been demonstrated in the UK:
In short: a small cache of bullets (including the “2.2mm rifle round,” which I’ve never heard of before, but which sounds truly impressive) found in a backyard pond. How did everyone involved respond? Rationally and reasonably? Well…
‘It’s sad because we love this house and have spent time and effort making it a home. And somebody somewhere has ruined that. I don’t want to stay in a house where that kind of thing has been found in the garden. I’m gutted.’
Note that the math in the story doesn’t work:
How you get >7,500 rounds out of that, I don’t know. And just what is a “machine gun round?” In any event, the lesson here is clear: if you want to drive someone away from their property in today’s Britain, simply scatter a few bullets around.
Some months ago, in a fit of “something must be done,” President Obama fired off a bunch of Executive Orders that were supposed to have some impact on firearms crimes. one of those orders directed the Centers for Disease Control to study firearms crimes, and how that impact public health. The National Academy of Sciences has just put out their report:
Where we learn:
Defensive uses of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence,
although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996;
Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive
gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by
criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to
more than 3 million per year (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about
300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the
other hand, some scholars point to radically lower estimate of only
108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization
Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per
year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken
from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is
difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically
about defensive gun use.
A different issue is whether defensive uses of guns, however numerous
or rare they may be, are effective in preventing injury to the gunwielding
crime victim. Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual
defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the
crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have
found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims
compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies (Kleck,
1988; Kleck and DeLone, 1993; Southwick, 2000; Tark and Kleck,
2004).
None of this is particularly new news to those who have been paying attention. Political hacks working to disarm the citizenry repeatedly trot out the line that a gun in the home is more likely to be used to kill a family member than to kill an intruder; but this of course ignores the fact that a gun can deter a violent intruder or other criminal *without* actually killing him. A “defensive use” of a gun might be to blow the back of a rapists skull off, but it might just as easily be the simple pointing of a gun at said rapist, or racking the slide of a shotgun. These actions will quite often cause your average criminal to decide to cease current operations and go somewhere else.
What *is* news is that this is an official response to a White House directive. One can hope (but little more than hope) that some reporter with actual integrity and courage will use this report to demand a response from Obama.
The title just sounds nutty. But the details make the incident sounds drearily familiar… about ten “attackers” went to a police station to slaughter people. Guess why. Go on, guess.
Oh, and guess what stopped these knife-wielding murderers. If you answered “people with guns,” collect your prize.
A few months ago:
In April of 1970 I was near Phu Tai, Vietnam in the 173rd Airborne Brigade Admin Compound. We were pissed off at taking Viet Cong sniper fire from the mountain above us several nights in a row. The guy would stand up from behind a rock and blow off a clip from his AK47 on full-auto. The sniper was shooting at such a high angle that most of his rounds came through the sheet metal roofs of our hooches. We decided to use a “heavy” response the next time(s) the sniper hit us.
Take a look at the photos at the link. No, really. Go look. Dayum.
Back in the 1970’s, the “Army surplus store” was actually filled with Army surplus. Military outfits, helmets, bayonets, de-miled flamethrowers, de-miled rocket launchers, flak jackets, instruments, grenades, shells, bombs, guns, you name it. Back then the stores were loaded with surplus from Viet Nam, Korea and even WWII, along with the “peacetime” in between. But if you go into such a store today, you’re far more likely to find a store full of commercial camping supplies and the like. Now, it’s not as if the military hasn’t been buying, and then replacing, shiploads of *stuff,* but there seems to be vastly less of it making its way back to the US civvie market. For instance: when was the last time you saw a civilian owned M-1 Abrams, AH-64 Apache or F-14 Tomcat?
There is news relevant on that topic:
the U.S. military has destroyed more than 170 million pounds worth of vehicles and other military equipment as it rushes to wind down its role in the Afghanistan war by the end of 2014.
About 2,000 MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles are listed as “excess” and are being shredded.
One would imagine that there are a vast number of AR-15/M-4/M-16 magazines that are kinda beat up, but that civilian gun owners woul snap up if the price was right. Not to mention the M-4’s, M-16’s, M-14’s, Barrets, sidearms and all the rest that would find many happy buyers back home.
Before the Polaris missile was developed, the US Navy studied several approaches to using submarines to launch ballistic missiles. An early idea was taken directly from WWII Germany… store Jupiter IRBMs in special canisters, towed behind subs. These would be partially flooded whe the subs got to the launch site; this would cause the canister to tip up 90 degrees. A few hours later, the liquid fueled Jupiter would be ready to launch. Additionally, there was some thought put into the idea of installing the Jupiter vertically within subs. But nobody much liked the idea of large liquid propellant missiles in submarines. So by April 1956 the idea then moved to solid propellant rockets designed to emulate the Jupiter, carrying the same payload on more or less the same trajectory. The missile would be fatter than the standard Jupiter, but also shorter. Still, at ten feet in diameter and 41 feet in length, it was a very large missile, and only four could be carried within the body of the sub and the greatly extended sail. Fortunately, within a few months the Polaris design came on the scene, a much smaller missile made possible by both a smaller warhead and higher energy density double-base solid propellant.
Lockheed illustration.
Some commercials from before irrational hoplophobia conquered the land:
[youtube aMqd5EQXD-g]
A very young Snake Plisken starts down the road…
[youtube Kb9_0N3g5bw]
[youtube 7E1JO6bADeQ]
And Ranger Lennier gets an early start on training to take down the Shadows…
[youtube 6e7KiM9PFBk]
[youtube jiQdigSSCm4]
[youtube qDMidB2eWd0]
[youtube tKFVsgQxVBk]
[youtube GPhZsauluXM]
And this is why we can’t have nice things:
[youtube Rk8-ePGqBmM]
While the ruling classes continue to try to figure out how to prevent people from arming themselves, the people continue to find not only new ways to arm themselves but also how to improve what’s available to ’em. For instance… not long ago a single-shot 3D printed pistol was demonstrated. It required an expensive high-end printer and could only fire a single shot before the barrel needed replacing. Now, an improved and cheaper 3D printed gun has demonstrated the ability to fire 9 shots before barrel replacement. Still pitiful by standard firearm standards, but still, improvement is improvement. Better still is the fact that this is work done by a different designer. The more designers, the better the designs… and the harder it will be for governments to control. Can’t stop the signal.
[youtube g3eDSGVsLQU]
Additionally, an somewhat less sensibly, 3D printing has been used to make bullets. Specifically, slugs for a 12 gauge shotgun. seems to me this might be fine for making prototypes and master parts for use in casting copies, but 3d printed bullets seem overly expensive.
[youtube PVyLGQUmXcg]
UPDATE: You can buy yo8ur own Lulzbot from Amazon:
In the early 1960’s, NASA wanted the Nova rocket: a launch system capable of orbiting around one million pounds. The primary missions included manned lunar and Mars missions, space station launches, that sort of thing. But other missions were contemplated, including military missions. Information on these military missions is pretty lean. This is most likely due to the fact that Nova was a NASA project with minimal DoD input… thus there would have been minimal actual work done on military launch planning for Nova. Nevertheless, a few snippets of military Nova data have come to light from time to time.
A General Dynamics/Astronautics presentation to NASA in August 1963 had a few paragraphs and a few charts discussing military missions. Sadly there was little more; it is impossible to determine if these concepts were actually requested by NASA or not, and whether these ideas went any further. BAMBI (BAllistic Missile Boost Intercept), an anti-missile satellite system, was studied by General Dynamics at the same time as Nova, and has largely remained classified (or at least, little has been made public). Like the anti-missile satellites studied during the SDI program of the 1980’s, for BAMBI to have had a chance of success at taking out a massed Soviet ICBM strike, a large number of the satellites would be needed. In the NOVA presentation, 14 million pounds worth of satellites – each weighing 4,000 pounds – were claimed as needed. In this case, launching 3,500 or so satellites would be a chore that Nova could handle easier than much smaller launch vehicles.
More unconventionally, Nova was also proposed as a logistics transport. In this case, it could be used to chuck a capsule across the planet sub-orbitally… a capsule with 2.5 million pounds of payload. Additionally, Nova could put a 1 million pound capsule into orbit; the capsule would de-orbit itself and land to disgorge infantry. Orbital systems were in a way prefered, as orbital systems meant that the Nova itself would go into orbit. This meant that the Nova could de-orbit on command an return to Earth at convenient locations for recovery; ballistic lobs would essentially throw the Nova away. The orbital capsule was at least illustrated with a drawing.
Finally, Nova could be used to launch offensive weapons. One million pounds were the weights given, so presumably these were meant to go into orbit. The weapons loads were remarkable, and more than a little spooky:
Note… these weapons loads are for a single launch.
Not provide in the presentation – or anywhere else that I’ve seen – is NASAs reaction to the idea of using their rocket to launch a million square miles worth of biological horror.
