Forgotten Weapons
Published on 14 Jul 2018http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
The Halbek Device was a clamp-on muzzle brake designed by two Rhodesians, Douglas Hall and Marthinus Bekker. It was patented in Rhodesia in 1977 and in the US in 1980, and manufactured in small numbers for the Rhodesian military. I have seen these occasionally, and doubt they are actually very effective. But during a filming trip to South Africa I had a chance to actually try one on a select-fire R1 FAL, complete with high speed camera to find out for sure. So, let’s see what they really do…
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
August 4, 2018
Rhodesia Made Their FALs Great With This One Weird Halbek Device!
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July 27, 2018
Toronto’s proposed handgun ban is a feelgood/do nothing distraction
Every time there’s a tragedy, there are calls from the local media for politicians to “do something”. Politicians are hard-wired to want to “do something” even without prompting. They want (and need, for electoral purposes) to be seen to be “doing something”, if only to divert any blamecasting away from themselves. The most recent tragedy was a senseless shooting on Toronto’s Danforth in the Greektown district. The shooter, who was either killed by police or committed suicide shortly after the attack, was apparently not a legal gun owner, and under current gun laws would not have been able to obtain a handgun. So, in the wake of the tragic deaths and injuries, Toronto city council jumped into action to be seen “doing something”. Chris Selley explains why the proposed ban of handgun and ammunition sales in the city will not make a difference, except to punish non-criminals:
The whiz-bang solution on everyone’s lips — from Mayor Tory to city councillors to the Toronto Star’s and Globe and Mail’s editorial boards and the usual activists — is to ban handguns. Tory admits there is no “magic wand” that will solve Toronto’s gun problem. But still he asks: “Why does anyone in this city need to have a gun at all?”
The idea has a very superficial appeal. We all wish the Danforth shooter hadn’t managed to get a hold of a gun. Toronto is having a bad year for shootings — not much worse than last year, but at the wrong end of a distinct and steady five-year-trend. (At this point in 2014 there had been 101 shootings and 127 fatalities; so far in 2018 there have been 228 shootings and 308 fatalities.) It is understandable (if not entirely creditable) that the Danforth shooting would have rapidly intensified demands for something to be done: the victim count was high, and it happened in a wealthy part of town where it would have been easy to pretend there wasn’t a problem at all.
Still, the limitations of a “handgun ban” are both many and obvious. When Canadian police forces occasionally report on the sources of crime guns, they often find the vast majority have been smuggled across the border. In Toronto nowadays, the number is reportedly more like 50 per cent; the rest of the supply comes from licensed handgun owners who sell them on illegally — a spectacularly risky thing to do, as any used in crimes would be instantly traced back to the registered owner, but apparently worth it to some.
But we all know how permeable the Canada-U.S. border is. If we made it impossible to own a handgun legally in Canada, is there any reason to suspect the cross-border flow couldn’t regain its market share? Furthermore, CTV reported Wednesday that the Danforth shooter’s handgun was prohibited — i.e., it could never have been licensed in Canada — and that he had obtained it from some gang associates. If true, his carnage illustrates the limitations of handgun bans better than it does their efficacy.
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July 18, 2018
Why use clips when you can use magazines?
Lindybeige
Published on 27 Jun 2018Why did soldiers in World War Two get issued with clips of ammunition instead of magazines? The reasons are quite practical. Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Lindybeige
My thanks to Bloke on the Range for the use of his rifles and costume.
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
▼ Follow me…
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Lindybeige I may have some drivel to contribute to the Twittersphere, plus you get notice of uploads.
website: http://www.LloydianAspects.co.uk
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July 13, 2018
QotD: Decline of the mainstream media
What happened to that instinct to go find the story that the “powers that be” wanted buried? Yeah, I know how the Internet has slashed into the paid-advertising model that supported “objective” daily newspapers. But don’t you think the ongoing loss of audience and credibility of the “legacy media” might also have something to do with the fact their little drones now all recite the “Leftist line” in unison — never challenge any of the sacred cows?
That what remains of the American and European “news media” would become captive to the screeching Collectivist/Globalist Left was predictable. First our colleges and now even the government youth propaganda camps (“public high schools”) have been captive to unionized Leftists pushing a thinly disguised Marxist agenda — Franz Fanon, Noam Chomsky and the like — for 45 years now. Public schools which quite purposely turn out graduates who are just barely literate enough to follow their marching orders, by the way, with most of a troublemaker’s innate sense of curiosity long since ground out of them.
(Real research is such a grind. We SO much more prefer the classes where we get good grades for just shouting our opinions about racism and oppression and stuff. And now we even get a free field trip to the state Capitol to shout it out for gun control! … even though we wouldn’t know a muzzle brake from a stripper clip, and couldn’t tell you who wrote the Bill of Rights or why he (or they) believed a citizenry armed with military-grade weapons is somehow “necessary to the security of a free state.” … Or even where that phrase appears.)
With the exception of a few pretty network news readers with great hair, no one ever went into journalism for the money. The sense since Woodward and Bernstein took down Richard Nixon was that journalists had a mission to take down greedy white “deplorable” politicians (and if we can’t find any, we’ll invent some. “If you’re for enforcing the existing immigration laws like every other nation on earth, you’re a racist!”)
The problem is not just a political “leaning.” The problem is that today’s crop of journalists are so incurious it never occurs to them to notice that their assignment editors are taking orders from owners and publishers who are on the same globalist/mind-control team as virtually all of those bought-and-paid-for politicians they’re supposed to be “exposing.” The big corporate guys don’t really care which politicians get taken down, since they’ve bought the “D”s AND the “R”s — they own Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi AND Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and Trey Gowdy. It’s Kabuki, it’s a Punch-and-Judy show to make people feel they’ve got a real choice.
Vin Suprynowicz, “On Reporters Who Ask No (Unapproved) Questions”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2018-06-03.
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June 19, 2018
Flying Aircraft Carriers – Reversed Bullets I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 18 Jun 2018
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June 2, 2018
YouTube Won’t Host Our Homemade Gun Video. So We Posted It on PornHub Instead.
ReasonTV
Published on 31 May 2018Reason has a new video out today explaining how to put together a homemade handgun using some very simple tools and parts you can buy online. But you won’t find it on our YouTube channel.
_____After the March for Our Lives rally, YouTube announced that it would no longer allow users to post videos that contain “instructions on manufacturing a firearm.”
Our video and its accompanying article are part of a package of stories in Reason‘s “Burn After Reading” issue. It includes a bunch of how-to’s, including how to bake pot brownies, how to use bitcoin anonymously, how to pick the lock on handcuffs, and how to hire an escort.
The whole issue is a celebration of free speech and our way of documenting how utterly futile of all kinds of prohibitions can be.
We made a video showing how easy it is to DIY a Glock because we wanted to show how the First Amendment reinforces the Second Amendment. If a bunch of journalists can build a handgun in their kitchen, we can assume it’ll be pretty hard to keep guns out of the hands of motivated criminals.
If YouTube prevents us from uploading the video, have they violated our First Amendment rights?
“YouTube of old days was this amazing thing that has become the digital library of Alexandria on the Internet,” says Karl Kasarda, the co-host of InRangeTV, a weekly YouTube show about guns. The show used to survive on ad revenue, until YouTube started de-monetizing certain forms of content. Once YouTube made it impossible for Kasarda to make money on its platform, he started posting his content to other places, including PornHub.
Last October Prager University, a conservative video production shop, sued YouTube, saying it had restricted the audience for content and alleging that the company was “unlawfully censoring its educational videos and discriminating against its right to freedom of speech.”
But here’s the thing: YouTube is a private platform. There is nothing in the First Amendment (or the Second) that requires them to host our gun video. Reason can turn down articles for any cause that we choose. We can do it because we don’t like the color of the author’s hair, or because we don’t like the font she used in her pitch email. We wouldn’t be violating a single constitutional right by doing so.
We wish YouTube would run our video. It’s awesome. But equally awesome is YouTube’s right — our right — not to run content we don’t like.
Karl Kasarda is correct that YouTube is the closest thing we have to the Library of Alexandria. It still doesn’t mean they have to carry our video.
YouTube is hardly the first to test this principle. In 1972, a teachers union president who was running for state legislature sued The Miami Herald, insisting it run an editorial he had written after he was attacked in its pages. The Supreme Court correctly ruled that ordering a newspaper to print an editorial violates the First Amendment. After all, a newspaper is “more than a passive receptacle.”
Prager University argued that YouTube isn’t entitled to the same editorial discretion as The Miami Herald because it advertises itself as a “platform for free expression” that’s “committed to fostering a community where everyone’s voice can be heard.” A federal judge, thankfully, dismissed the Prager lawsuit, rejecting the company’s argument that YouTube is comparable to a “government entity” and thus must be open-access. A slew of other judges have arrived at the same conclusion.
YouTube deserves the same editorial latitude those judges gave to The Miami Herald in the 1970s and that Reason enjoys today.
And that’s one of the things our new gun video is celebrating. If YouTube doesn’t want to post it to their site, its loss. We’ll just post it to another platform. That’s what the free and open internet is all about. So if you want to see our video, you can watch it here at Reason.com — or head over to PornHub and see how to make your very own unregistered firearm.
Links:
https://reason.com/archives/2018/05/31/how-to-legally-make-your-own-o
https://www.pornhub.com/view_video.php?viewkey=ph5b0460dc60380Edited by Todd Krainin. Narrated by Katherine Mangu-Ward. Written by Jim Epstein and Katherine Mangu-Ward. Cameras by Meredith Bragg.
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May 31, 2018
No5 MkI Enfield “Jungle Carbine”
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 18 Jan 2015http://www.forgottenweapons.com
The No.5 MkI Enfield, commonly called the “jungle carbine” is nearly the shortest-lived rifle in British military service. Introduced in 1944, they were declared obsolete in 1947 as the result of insoluble accuracy problems. The guns were originally developed from regular No4 Enfield rifles with the goal of producing a shorter and lighter variant for paratroops. This was done by shortening the barrel, adding a flash hider, and making lightening cuts in several places on the barrel and receiver (which were the cause of the problems that doomed the gun).
Not all No.5 rifles produced developed problems, and they were certainly handier than the regular Enfield rifles. They are noted for kicking harder, of course, and this is not really helped by the narrow rubber buttpad they came with (most of which are nice and hard today).
Theme music by Dylan Benson – http://dbproductioncompany.webs.com
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May 1, 2018
Shooting a Suppressed Sten Gun
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 19 Mar 2018Sold for $7,475 (transferrable).
During World War Two, the British spent several years developing a silenced version of the Sten gun for special operations commandos and for dropping to mainland European resistance units. This is a recreation of one of the experimental types, based on a MkII Sten with the receiver lengthened into an integral suppressor. So – how does it shoot?
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April 20, 2018
Food for thought on those “second US civil war” comments
Tom Kratman, Mil-SF author and former US Army officer responds to a Quora article titled “Why does the 2nd Amendment bother Europeans so much?” and shared some of his answer on Facebook:
More fun on Quora:
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-the-2nd-Amendment-bother-Europeans-so-much/answer/Pietro-Del-Buono#
A Sample: And here; since you’re not apparently ambitious enough to read it, I’ll copy you what I sent Stafford on just this question:
The Viet Cong, the Taliban, and the Iraqi resistance would all, at this point in time, be terribly surprised to learn of the omnipotence of the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps (retired lieutenant colonel, Infantry, former faculty of the war college, to boot; yes, I’ve had a varied and fun life). It isn’t, remember, a million citizens with arms, it’s probably over 80 million, just to begin with, most of us armed to deck out the wives, children, grandchildren, and no small number of the neighbors. I can, personally, outfit at least one short platoon while my former law firm, when I was in practice, could have fielded a company, less mortars and anti-tank, yes, to include with automatic weapons (machine guns, which are also legal here, though pricey).
How they would do this is perhaps more detailed and more bloody minded than you want, but, basically, tanks do not move when small arms dominating the roads mean they don’t get fuel delivered (no, aerial resupply is highly problematic). Neither do aircraft fly when no trucks or rail bring aviation fuel. Police, who are actually the decisive arm of counter-insurgency (see your own Sir Robert Thompson), pretty much require a disarmed citizenry to exercise control. Facing an armed citizenry willing to kill them, their risks and losses are too great for effectiveness. And then there’s sheer terror: “Nice family you have, Officer Quigley; be a damned shame if, say, you didn’t look the other way when we tell you to and they all ended up dead, don’t you think?”
Most of the US military preponderance is technological. Martin van Creveld has an interesting observation on that, which goes to the effect that high tech really only works well in very simple environments, air, open desert, at sea, and that a) it tends to fail badly when the environment gets more complex, while b) the human heart is the most complex environment of all. In other words, the forces of government would rarely know just who their enemies were in order to bring that tech to bear.
And then there’s the last aspect, an aspect, I think, Euros have the greatest difficulty understanding. Our police and armed forces are simply not reliable, over most of the country (remember, too, we have no real national police force or gendarmerie, not of any size and power, anyway) to the federal government. No, I don’t mean only the state based National Guards; the _regular_ forces actually draw most of their personnel from areas where folk revere the country and the constitution, but tend to detest the federal government. Called on to suppress a rebellion with which they by and large agreed, they’d defect in droves.Indeed, they might be at the forefront of rebellion. You may recall Obama talking about a civilian force, equal in size, budget, and power to DoD? I’ve never been able to shake the feeling that he had Pinochet and Allende in mind when he spoke those words, because he knew, deep down, that he and the left (our left, which is, of course, to the right, generally, of the Euro left) could not rule out a coup in the event of their pushing their agenda just that little bit too far.
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April 5, 2018
Mark Steyn on the YouTube shooting in San Bruno
The shooting at the YouTube offices in San Bruno, California may not be in the headlines for long, as the story is so off-beat compared to other recent events that it doesn’t easily fit the model the media prefers for reporting gun crime (or high tech stories). Mark Steyn calls it the “grand convergence”:
The San Bruno attack also underlines a point I’ve been making for over a decade, ever since my troubles with Canada’s “human rights” commissions: “Hate speech” doesn’t lead to violence so much as restraints on so-called “hate speech” do – because, when you tell someone you can’t say that, there’s nothing left for him to do but open fire or plant his bomb. Restricting speech – or even being perceived to be restricting speech – incentivizes violence as the only alternative. As you’ll notice in YouTube comments, I’m often derided as a pansy fag loser by the likes of ShitlordWarrior473 for sitting around talking about immigration policy as opposed to getting out in the street and taking direct action. In a culture ever more inimical to freedom of expression, there’ll be more of that: The less you’re permitted to say, the more violence there will be.
Google/YouTube and Facebook do not, of course, make laws, but their algorithms have more real-world impact than most legislation – and, having started out as more or less even-handed free-for-alls, they somehow thought it was a great idea to give the impression that they’re increasingly happy to assist the likes of Angela Merkel and Theresa May as arbiters of approved public discourse. Facebook, for example, recently adjusted its algorithm, and by that mere tweak deprived Breitbart of 90 per cent of its ad revenue. That’s their right, but it may not have been a prudent idea to reveal how easily they can do that to you.
What happened yesterday is a remarkable convergence of the spirits of the age: mass shootings, immigration, the Big Tech thought-police, the long reach of the Iranian Revolution, animal rights, vegan music videos… But in a more basic sense the horror in San Bruno was a sudden meeting of two worlds hitherto assumed to be hermetically sealed from each other: the cool, dispassionate, dehumanized, algorithmic hum of High Tech – and the raw, primal, murderous rage breaking through from those on the receiving end.
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March 26, 2018
Kalashnikov vs Sturmgewehr!
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 17 Sep 2016http://jamesdjulia.com/item/3024-394/ (MP-44)
http://jamesdjulia.com/item/3020-394/ (Type 56 AK)The German Sturmgewehr and the Soviet Kalashnikov are widely and rightly considered the two most influential and iconic of the modern military rifles. While the German rifle certainly influenced the Soviet design, the two were designed with different intentions and goals. The Sturmgewehr was an attempt to blend the roles of rifle and light machine gun, while the Kalashnikov was intended to blend the roles of rifle and submachine gun – and yet they both reached largely the same practical reality.
Which do you think was the better system?
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February 27, 2018
Australian Prototype Jungle Carbine Enfields
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 24 Mar 2017Shortened No1 Mk3*: Sold for $6,900 – http://jamesdjulia.com/item/1655-396/
No6 Mk1: Sold for $12,075 – http://jamesdjulia.com/item/1652-396/
No6 Mk1/1: Sold for $12,650 – http://jamesdjulia.com/item/1651-396/In 1943, experimentation began in Great Britain, Canada, and Australia into developing a shortened and lightened version of the Lee Enfield rifle. In Australia, the work was done on the No1 Mk3* rifle, as the Lithgow Arsenal had never switched over to production of the No4 rifle.
We have three experimental prototype carbines from Lithgow to look at today. The first is simply a shortened SMLE, with no serious effort given to reducing weight. This rifle is visually very similar to the commercial SMLE “Jungle Carbines” marketed by a number of companies, although the real one here has several features missing form the commercial copies – most notably a simple rear aperture sight.
The other two are examples of the two types of rifle that were ultimately considered for formal adoption (and a large order for one was actually placed, before being cancelled at the end of WW2). These are designated the No6 Mk1 (with a rear aperture sight) and the No6 Mk1/1 (with a rear tangent sight). Approximately 100 of each were made, half with brass buttplates and half with rubber recoil pads. In this form, slightly more than a pound was removed from the standard SMLE, and the reduced length did make for a handier rifle. The Australian need for this type of carbine was removed with the end of the war, although in Great Britain the No5 Mk1 carbine – the same in practical terms as these Australian examples – would be taken into formal service for several years.
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February 22, 2018
QotD: The importance of defining your terms
If you don’t understand these [gun-related] terms already, why should you care? You should care because when you misuse them, you signal substantially broader gun restrictions than you may actually be advocating. So, for instance, if you have no idea what semi-automatic means, but you’ve heard it and it sounds scary, and you assume that it means some kind of machine gun, so you argue semi-automatics should be restricted, you’ve just conveyed that most modern handguns (save for revolvers) should be restricted, even if that’s not what you meant.
It’s hard to grasp the reaction of someone who understands gun terminology to someone who doesn’t. So imagine we’re going through one of our periodic moral panics over dogs and I’m trying to persuade you that there should be restrictions on, say, Rottweilers.
Me: I don’t want to take away dog owners’ rights. But we need to do something about Rottweilers.
You: So what do you propose?
Me: I just think that there should be some sort of training or restrictions on owning an attack dog.
You: Wait. What’s an “attack dog?”
Me: You know what I mean. Like military dogs.
You: Huh? Rottweilers aren’t military dogs. In fact “military dogs” isn’t a thing. You mean like German Shepherds?
Me: Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody’s trying to take away your German Shepherds. But civilians shouldn’t own fighting dogs.
You: I have no idea what dogs you’re talking about now.
Me: You’re being both picky and obtuse. You know I mean hounds.
You: What the fuck.
Me: OK, maybe not actually ::air quotes:: hounds ::air quotes::. Maybe I have the terminology wrong. I’m not obsessed with vicious dogs like you. But we can identify kinds of dogs that civilians just don’t need to own.
You: Can we?Because I’m just talking out of my ass, the impression I convey is that I want to ban some arbitrary, uninformed category of dogs that I can’t articulate. Are you comfortable that my rule is going to be drawn in a principled, informed, narrow way?
So. If you’d like to persuade people to accept some sort of restrictions on guns, consider educating yourself so you understand the terminology that you’re using. And if you’re reacting to someone suggesting gun restrictions, and they seem to suggest something nonsensical, consider a polite question of clarification about terminology.
Ken White, “Talking Productively About Guns”, Popehat, 2015-12-07.
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February 20, 2018
Russian Rifles of World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special feat. C&Rsenal
The Great War
Published on 19 Feb 2018Othais’ video about the Winchester Contract Rifle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4grSRn5wnHI
Indy and Othais from C&Rsenal talk about Russian Rifles during World War 1.
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February 14, 2018
Russian Pistols of World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special feat. C&Rsenal
The Great War
Published on 13 Feb 2018Watch C&Rsenal: http://youtube.com/candrsenal
Indy talks to our weapons expert Othais about the Russian Pistols of World War 1.
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