Forgotten Weapons
Published on 17 Aug 2018More info: https://www.forgottenweapons.com/suomi-m-31-finlands-excellent-submachine-gun/
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Designed by Aimo Lahti, the Suomi m/31 submachine gun is in my opinion one of the standout submachine guns of the World War Two era. Despite its hefty weight (10.4lb / 4.7kg) and lack of a good pistol grip stock, it still manages to be tremendously controllable and accurate, with a very high rate of fire (about 900 rpm).
For a detailed written description of the history and development of the weapon, I would refer you to the excellent article by Jaeger Platoon: http://www.jaegerplatoon.net/MACHINEP…
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
September 7, 2018
Suomi m/31 – Finland’s Excellent Submachine Gun
August 25, 2018
Swedish Antiaircraft Artillery: Bofors 40mm Automatic Gun M1
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 24 Aug 2018Note: In the video I mistakenly describe this as a two-stamp NFA gun. It is actually deactivated, and thus does not require a tax stamp. Sorry for the mistake!
http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
The Swedish Bofors company developed their 40mm antiaircraft gun in the 1930s, and it would go on to be one of the most successful weapon designs in modern history. Used by both sides in WWII and in all theaters, improved versions of the 40mm Bofors gun continue to serve in military front lines to this very day. In the US, they comprise part of the armament on the AC-130 Spectre gunships, for example.
This particular gun is a WW2 vintage piece, made in Sweden. Most of the examples used by the United States were made under license by Chrysler, the car company. Something like 60,000 were produced during the war, mostly for naval use. These guns would be a mainstay of American vessels’ air defense against Japanese Kamikaze attacks.
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
August 18, 2018
Mythbusting with the .30-06 American Chauchat: Reliability Test
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 28 Jul 2018http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Everyone knows, of course, that the Chauchat is the worst gun ever, and can’t normally get through an entire magazine without malfunctioning. Well, let’s try that out … and with an even worse culprit; an M1918 Chauchat made for the AEF in .30-06.
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
August 11, 2018
Cobray Terminator at the Range: The Worst Shotgun Ever
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 21 Jul 2018http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
Most of the guns made by Cobray are pretty awful, but one can at least understand the market they were made for. The Terminator is different, because it really is rather incomprehensible who would have actually thought that a single shot, open bolt 12 gauge shotgun with a terrible stock would be a good thing to spend money on. Really the only explanation I can come up with is that it looks industrial and mean, and I suppose some people would have bought it just for that.
Having taken one to the range now, my suspicions of its terribleness have been fully confirmed. It actually is painful to shoot, and the open bolt slamfire mechanism does a great job of magnifying the inevitable flinch it will give you. It’s clunky and annoying to reload, and also to unload after firing. I never did figure out why it was failing to fire so much for me, unless it was simply a short firing pin with deep-set primers. To be honest, I don’t really care. I’m just happy to be able to send it back to the generous (if perhaps sadistic) viewer who loaned it to me.
If you enjoy Forgotten Weapons, check out its sister channel, InRangeTV! http://www.youtube.com/InRangeTVShow
August 6, 2018
OSS “Stinger” Covert Cigarette Guns
Forgotten Weapons
Published on 16 Jul 2018http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons
During World War Two, the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) was the primary US clandestine operations organization. It was responsible for making all sorts of unique weapons, including these “Stinger” cigarette guns. They were single shot disposable .22 Short pistols.
The first pattern was contracted and manufactured entirely by the OSS, and 25,000 of them were manufactured early in the war. They proved to have a myriad of minor to moderate problems, though, including failures to fire and burst barrels. A second version was produced by the Ordnance Department in 1944, with a strengthened and improved design, and 25,500 of those were made.
I have not found any documentation of these being actually used, but then again not much documentation exists on the use of any OSS weapons. These sorts of things were often provided to infiltration agents who might never be heard from again, or dropped to partisan or resistance groups who weren’t exactly writing field reports on their gear.
Many thanks to the collector who provided me access to these!
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!
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
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.
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
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.
June 19, 2018
Flying Aircraft Carriers – Reversed Bullets I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 18 Jun 2018
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
