Last week a congressman embarrassed himself on Twitter. He got into a debate about gun control, suggested a mandatory buyback — which is basically confiscation with a happy face sticker on it — and when someone told him that they would resist, he said resistance was futile because the government has nukes.
And everybody was like, wait, what?
Of course the congressman is now saying that using nuclear weapons on American gun owners was an exaggeration, he just wanted to rhetorically demonstrate that the all-powerful government could crush us peasants like bugs, they hold our pathetic lives in their iron hand, and he’d never ever advocate for the use of nuclear weapons on American soil (that would be bad for the environment!), and instead he merely wants to send a SWAT team to your house to shoot you in the face if you don’t comply.
See? That’s way better.
Larry Correia, “The 2nd Amendment Is Obsolete, Says Congressman Who Wants To Nuke Omaha”, Monster Hunter Nation, 2018-11-19.
September 25, 2021
QotD: The 2nd Amendment is obsolete because … the government has nukes?
September 22, 2021
Ishapore SMLE MkI** India Pattern
Forgotten Weapons
Published 6 Feb 2017While many people are familiar with the Ishapore 2A1 rifles chambered in 7.62mm NATO (largely thanks to their importation and sale in the US in large numbers), production of Indian Enfield rifles actually dates back to 1905, when the Ishapore arsenal was opened. The first rifles produced there were a batch of 3,000 MkI Enfield rifles in 1908/9. These were of course early pattern SMLEs, with features like split charger bridges, volley sights, and magazine cutoffs. Production quickly changed to the No1 Mk III pattern of rifle, which had been formally adopted in Britain in 1907.
During World War One, the need for arms led to those first early rifles being rebuilt in the MkIII configuration, but they retain their original markings, showing their origin. Today we have one of those first 3,000 to look at.
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September 19, 2021
Chassepot: Best of the Needle Rifles
Forgotten Weapons
Published 3 May 2019The Model 1866 Chassepot was France’s first military cartridge-firing rifle. It used a self-contained paper cartridge on the same basic principle as the Prussian 1841 Dreyse rifle, but was a substantial improvement on that system. The Chassepot fired an 11mm bullet at about 1350 fps (410 m/s), which was substantially higher velocity than the Dreyse. It was more accurate and had a substantially longer effective range. The French would produce about 1.5 million Chassepot rifles, most of them before the Franco-Prussian War.
Despite the quality of the Chassepot rifle, that war would go tremendously badly for the French, with hundreds of thousands of men and arms captured by the Prussians and the new German state being declared in the palace of Versailles. In the aftermath, many German cavalry units would adopt Chassepots for their own use, until the Gewehr 71 was available in carbine form. The French would resume Chassepot production briefly after the war, but would soon transition to a new rifle, the metallic cartridge firing Gras.
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September 18, 2021
Early American Ammunition
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September 14, 2021
Sturmgewehr MP-44 Part II: History & Implementation
Forgotten Weapons
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The Sturmgewehr was the result of a German intermediate cartridge development program that began in the mid-1930s. It was sidelined for a period as the focus of German Ordnance shifted to full-power rifles in 8x57mm with telescopic sights, but as the German fighting in Russia became more desperate, many Ordnance officers realized that the greater firepower offered by the Sturmgewehr concept was one of the few options that might be able to allow depleted German units to effectively hold ground against Russian attacks.
To this end, the guns were issued primarily in the East, with whole companies being equipped in order to focus a maximum amount of firepower, rather than spreading the new rifles piecemeal across all units. Ultimately, of course, this was insufficient to prevent the growing Soviet advance — but for the individual German soldier, an MP-43/44/StG-44 would have been a much more comforting weapon than a Kar98k Mauser!
September 11, 2021
Sturmgewehr MP-44 Part I: Mechanics
Forgotten Weapons
Published 27 Sep 2016The MP-43 (which is mechanically identical to the MP-44 and StG-44; the differences are the subject for another video later) is a tilting bolt rifle with a long stroke gas piston. It was manufactured primarily from complex sheet steel stampings, as a way to minimize the amount of high-quality and thus difficult to acquire steels needed for its construction. The rifle is heavy by today’s standards, but remarkably ergonomic (except for the metal handguard, when heats up quickly). Its sights come right up to the eye when shouldering the rifle, and it disassembles quickly and easily.
It really is one of the best small arms developed during World War II.
September 8, 2021
The Line‘s She-lection Bullshit Bulletin No. 3 … scary black fully semi-automatic assault machinegun edition
The folks at The Line continue their good work in pointing out some of the bullshittiest bullshit the politicians spew on the campaign trail. This week has been all about politicians promising to crack down even harder on the hunters and sport shooters who keep driving their pickup trucks (plastered with Trump bumper stickers, of course) into downtown Toronto to shoot their scary black fully semi-automatic AK-15 or AR-47 assault machineguns with chainsaw bayonets at innocent gang-bangers at 3 in the morning:
It is hard to know where to even begin picking through the bullshit that Canadians have had dumped atop their heads this week on the gun-control file. Both the Liberals and Conservatives hurled their share, but the worst offenders were by far the incumbents who claimed to ban “military-style assault weapons”.
Let’s start with this: Canadian law categorizes guns into three categories depending on their technical specifications: length, ammunition calibre, mode of operation, and the like. The categories are licensed and regulated differently. It can get pretty complicated. Despite their near-constant use, the terms “assault rifle”, “assault weapon” or the even-scarier sounding “military style assault weapon/rifle” have no specific or universally recognized meaning, including under Canadian law and firearms regulations. They aren’t part of or used by the categorization system.
This is essential to understand: because the terms have no specific and universally held meaning, these campaign-ready phrases can be appended to pretty much any type of rifle, whatever its actual legal category under our law. And that’s how we all found ourselves aspirating bullshit this week.
Most gun experts would generally classify an assault rifle/weapon as a rifle that fires medium-powered (or higher) ammunition and is capable of a “full auto” mode — that is, the weapon will continue firing as long as the trigger is held down. This results in a rapid volley of bullets at a cost of diminished accuracy (the recoil makes the firearm difficult to hold on target). These firearms typically have their ammunition kept in detachable magazines of 20 or 30 rounds each. When a magazine is emptied, it can be replaced by a practiced user in moments.
These sorts of weapons have been banned in Canada since the 1970s.
In 2020, the Liberals used an executive order — an Order in Council — to change the classification of several broad categories of until-then legal rifles, with the effect of preventing sales and further restricting most lawful uses for owners. None of these firearms were assault rifles/weapons by any reasonable standard. All are capable of semi-auto operation only, meaning one round is fired for each pull of the trigger. Under Canadian law, the magazines are limited to five rounds (there are some rare exceptions but five is the law).
Sigh. Still with us?
So the Liberals chose firearms linked to tragic events in Canada or abroad, like the AR-15, deemed these “assault weapons” and then banned them. But there was nothing meaningful or rational about this ban; it was was entirely a matter of political messaging. Numerous other rifles — firing the exact same ammunition from the exact same size of magazine at the exact same semi-automatic pace — remain legal and for sale to any licensed would-be purchaser. This isn’t an oversight. It’s just that the Liberals’ political goals were met by simply banning rifles linked to tragedies and ignoring the rest.
That’s the key thing to understand about what the Liberals did — it was always bullshit policy. But it sounds good to Canadian voters who don’t know fuck-all about guns. In that way, it’s meeting the Liberals’ needs.
Conservative leader Erin O’Toole quickly abandoned his party’s pledge to revoke the Liberals’ 2020 order-in-council once someone noticed and called attention to it. This should not be a surprise to anyone who has paid attention to O’Toole in the past … he’s what we used to call a “Red Tory” — really just a Liberal wearing a blue suit.
September 7, 2021
L. Neil Smith, 12 May 1946 – 27 August 2021
From what might be the penultimate issue of the Libertarian Enterprise, Neil’s daughter Rylla Smith says farewell to her father:
Lester Neil Smith III, novelist and political commentator, gunsmith and musician, visionary and futurist, passed away on Friday, August 27th at Poudre Valley Hospital after a lengthy battle with heart and kidney disease. He was 75 years old.
A long-time resident of Fort Collins, Colorado, Neil was born on May 12th, 1946 at Mercy Hospital in Denver, Colorado to Maj. Lester N. Smith II and Marie L. Coveleskie Smith.
Neil, known in the world of science fiction as L. Neil Smith or, affectionately, “El Neil”, is survived by his beloved wife, Cathy L.Z. Smith, his daughter, Rylla C. Smith, his brother Roger L. Smith, his nephews Nolan and Travis, and his aunt, Barbara Ohlwiler, as well as countless friends and brothers-in-arms. He was preceded in death by his mother and father.
Neil’s life was one spent perpetually looking forward — toward the future of freedom, of technology, of the continuation of the evolution of the human body, mind, and spirit, and toward the endless sea of stars. As a child, he wanted to be a marine biologist, to discover the unknown in the depths of the seas; this translated naturally in his young adulthood to a thirst for knowledge of the far greater unknown beyond the shores of this world.
Neil had an avid interest in the politics of personal liberty and always stood for what he believed to be right. He had a passion for friendly debate and never shied away from speaking his mind.
In the late 1970s, he wrote the first of his many novels, The Probability Broach, which began a long and prolific career in the burgeoning world of liberty-oriented science fiction, and was the creator of the Prometheus Award, as well as the recipient of the 2016 Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Memorial services will be held in Fort Collins, Colorado on a date yet to be determined; for more information, please follow Neil’s memorial page on EverLoved.com or contact Rylla Smith at ryllacat@gmail.com.
“And yet, what is bravery but the capacity to reject our fears, ignore and supress them, then go on to do whatever it is we are afraid to do.” — L. Neil Smith
September 6, 2021
Arms for the Taliban
Mark Steyn points out an absolutely unbelievable statistic about the military equipment windfall the US military presented to the Taliban in their rush for the exits out of Afghanistan (in bold, below):
Denyse O’Leary, whom I always read with great interest in our Comments section, chides me for diagnosing our present woes but not proposing solutions.
That ought to be easy. In Afghanistan what needed to be done is almost as old as man. As Victor David Hanson pointed out to Tucker, “This is the greatest loss of military equipment in the history of warfare by one power.”
He’s right. Because US government is so drunkenly profligate, the numbers sound blah-blah to jaded American ears. But $85-90 billion is larger than the annual military budget for every nation around the world except the US and China. For those partial to the International Jewish Conspiracy theory of history, what America has just given the Taliban is equivalent to 85 per cent of all the military aid Washington has given Israel since 1948. The Taliban now possess more Black Hawk helicopters than almost all America’s allies; they own near to a tenth of all Humvees on the planet. That’s aside from less obvious items, such as over 160,000 radios and over 16,000 night-vision goggles that will come in mighty handy for wiping out the remnants of resistance in the Panjshir Valley.
The “solution” to this is to do what every army has known to do down through the millennia: a retreat means not just preventing your men from falling into the hands of the enemy but also their weapons – including, if necessary, your allies’ weapons. As many readers will know, at the beginning of July 1940, just a week after France threw in the towel and signed its armistice with Germany, the Royal Navy attacked and disabled the French fleet, then the largest and most powerful in Continental Europe.
The British priority was to prevent the ships falling into the hands of Germany and Italy, who would put them to very good use. In a few days of urgent negotiation, the French commander resisted London’s “suggestion” that he either place the fleet under British command or take it to the French West Indies. So the Royal Navy struck and over 1,300 French sailors were killed.
But the Germans didn’t get hold of France’s most powerful battleships — and the following day, when the French ambassador complained about it to FDR during Washington’s Fourth of July observances, the President said he would have done exactly the same.
Yet Roosevelt’s successor did not do the same — in far more propitious circumstances and on a timeline created by the commander-in-chief and his advisors.Is the Pentagon total crap? Yes, but, like so many other rackets in Washington, it works for its principal beneficiaries: the defense contractors made over two trillion bucks off the Afghan war, so a mere eighty-five billions’ worth of materiel winding up with the goatherds is way below the lobbyists’ pay grade. The official position of America’s National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan (a fetching twelve-year-old lad whose pressers give the vague feeling he’s auditioning for the Dancing Boys of Kandahar), has conceded:
We don’t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone, but certainly a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban.
Functioning armies know how many pencils they have. As I said, I take it as read that Thoroughly Modern Milley and the Chiefs of Staff are total crap — all ribbons and no chest, the self-garlanded buffoons of a way of war that has not worked for decades: I see David Horowitz and Daniel Greenfield are calling for the Joint Chiefs to be court-martialed, which is the very least one would expect for gifting a Nato-level military to one’s enemies. But the fact that every commander on the ground went along without apparent objection suggests that Milley-style degeneracy runs very deep in the US military.
September 4, 2021
The Mauser Train: High Adventure in the Last Days of WWII
Forgotten Weapons
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Only days ahead of the French Army in April 1945, Ott-Helmuth von Lossnitzer and about 250 Mauser engineers and technicians fled Oberndorf with the core of Mauser’s new projects. They had the drawings, components, and gages for guns like the new StG-45 assault rifle, MK214 aircraft cannon, and Volkspistol and they were headed for an impregnable series of tunnels in the Austrian Alps to carry on the war. In a story that is absolutely worthy of film adaptation they scrounged a series of locomotives, dodged P47 Thunderbolt attacks, and went careening through the Alps with about 2 dozen boxcars of the most important prototype guns in the German arsenal.
Of course, the idea of continued resistance was a complete fantasy. When it did finally arrive in Ötztal, the Mauser refugees found all the tunnels already occupied by other groups with the very same idea. So they basically made camp and waited for American forces to arrive. The train was found by a British-American CIOS (Combined Intelligence Objective Subcommittee) party, the engineers were all questioned, and the train contents packed up for shipment to the UK and US. Ott-Helmuth von Lossnitzer himself emigrated to the US as part of Operation Paperclip, where he worked for Springfield Arsenal for many years until retiring in 1968 and then living in Wisconsin until his passing in 1989.
For anyone interested in this story, I highly recommend Lossnitzer’s oral recollections compiled into book form by Leslie Field and Bas Martens – ISBN 9789081737807. It is out of print now, but you may be able to find it on the secondary market.
Much more accessible is the reprinting of the original CIOS report on Mauser published by Peter Dallhammer (whom you may recall from his Textbook of Pistol Technology and Design). This is a 360-page treasure trove of details on Mauser’s ongoing R&D in 1945, and it is available on Amazon:
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September 1, 2021
1893 Lee-Metford Trials Carbine (One of Only 100 Made)
Forgotten Weapons
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Once Lee-Metford rifle production was in place, the British began working on a carbine version of the same action for their cavalry. In 1893 a trial run of 100 carbines were made, and today we are looking at serial number 32 of that batch. These carbines are different in several ways from the ultimately adopted pattern. They had exposed muzzles like the Martini carbines, instead of the heavy snub-nose muzzle that would be adopted (similar to the muzzle of most early Mauser carbines). These trials carbines also had no safety, no sling attachments, and no barrel band. The did have the bent bolt handle of the final pattern (albeit not flattened down) and the short 6-round magazine.
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August 29, 2021
MP-28: Hugo Schmeisser Improves the MP18
Forgotten Weapons
Published 22 Aug 2017The MP28,II was Hugo Schmeisser’s improved take on the original World War One MP18,I design. It used a simple box magazine in place of the Luger drum magazines, and this magazine would form the basis for a long series of military SMG magazines. It was a double-stack, single feed design because Schmeisser thought this would prevent some malfunctions that were possible with double-feed magazines (and because Mauser probably had a patent on the double feed box magazine at the time). This magazine would be used in conversions of MP18 guns, and would also be the model for the MP-38/40 and subsequent British Sten gun magazines.
The MP28 also introduced a semiautomatic selector switch, where the MP18 had been a fully automatic-only design. It is the presence of this selector button over the trigger, along with a tangent sight instead of a simple flip-up notch that can be used to distinguish between an updated MP18 and an MP28.
While the MP28 was not formally adopted by the German military, it was used by police and SS units, as well as being adopted or copied by a wide selection of other nations, including Portugal, Spain, China, Japan, and Ethiopia.
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August 26, 2021
Winchester WWII 50 AT rifle
Forgotten Weapons
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David Marshall Williams was hired by the Winchester company in 1939, and would have a hand in a number of major projects during his 10-year stint with the company, although best known for the M1 Carbine. The Carbine was an offshoot of the Winchester G30 and G30M rifles, which would also evolve into the G30R and Winchester Automatic Rifle. Another offshoot using this same basic mechanism was this undesignated .50 BMG semiautomatic antitank rifle developed by Winchester during World War II.
This rifle, like its developmental precursors, uses a two-lug, Garand type rotating bolt and a Williams gas tappet short stroke action. It has a 10-round detachable box magazine.
Although I have not found a testing report, the gun was apparently tested by the Canadian military and performed quite well. It was never purchased or put into serial production, however, most likely because as an antitank rifle the .50 BMG cartridge was not effective by the end of World War II.
August 22, 2021
Mounties’ First Revolver: the NWMP Adams MkIII
Forgotten Weapons
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The first handguns issued by the North West Mounted Police (which would later become the modern RCMP) were 330 Adams revolvers, requisitioned by the new police service in March 1874, and shipped over from England. Upon their receipt in July of that year, the Mounties were dismayed to find thoroughly worn out Adams Mk I 5-shot conversions from old percussion revolvers. These were found totally unfit for frontier service, and an appeal was sent back to England for something better.
A replacement shipment arrived in October 1875, and this time they received 326 much better Adams MkIII revolvers (330 were shipped, but 4 were stolen in transit). The MkIII pattern was a purpose-made .450 Adams cartridge revolver, holding six shots with a double action trigger and solid frame. These served very well, and the NWMP ordered more in 1880 — for which they instead received Enfield revolvers, which had replaced the Adams in British military service by that time.
The 326 Adams MkIII revolvers issued by the NWMP were marked by a local gunsmith upon their arrival. The right side of the frames are marked “C M.P.” (presumably Canada Mounted Police) and given a police inventory number just below the barrel (in addition to the serial number above the trigger). These issue numbers were defaced when the guns were sold out of service.
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August 19, 2021
Hill SMG/Pistol: Inspiration for the FN P90
Forgotten Weapons
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John L. Hill was a World War One fighter pilot [in the short-lived Canadian Air Force] who went into the oil and gas industry, and enjoyed tinkering with guns in his free time. In 1949 he got an idea for a new style of magazine and feed system, which he developed and patented in the early 1950s. Hill’s intention was to create a submachine gun for the military or police that held its magazine flat atop the action, instead of sticking out of the gun where it would get in the way. To do this, Hill designed the system that would be later used in the FN P90, with ammunition held perpendicular to the barrel, and a turret mechanism in the action to turn the cartridges 90 degrees for feeding in the chamber.
Hill built seven or eight fully automatic prototypes, which were examined by the US Army and the FBI. One was tested at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in 1953, and we still have some of the photos from that examination (that particular gun was built using an MP40 barrel, interestingly). Hill’s guns varied in pretty much all details, including different barrel lengths, stock configurations, and magazines. Some used single-stack and some double-stack magazines, but all were a simple blowback action.
At some point in the late 50s or early 60s, Hill sold his patent rights to a pair of Texas businessmen who built 90 or 100 more examples (mostly semiautomatic) under the name H&B Enterprises. They took one to FN in Belgium, who found it interesting but did not opt to license or produce it. Ultimately, nobody was interested enough to put the gun into production, and only a small number of the H&B guns survive today. The original Hill prototypes were donated to the Lone Star Flight Museum in Texas in 1993, although it is not clear where they are today.
When FN began to design the P90 in the early 1980s, Hill’s concept made a return. It is not known exactly how much direct link there was between the Hill prototype and the P90 concept, but the eventual patents filed on the P90 do reference Hill’s patents (among others). The P90 remains the only production firearm to use this clever rotary feeding system.
Hill’s patents:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2…
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2…
https://patents.google.com/patent/US2…For more documents, see the Forgotten Weapons page on this design:
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