The Great War
Published on 18 Jun 2018
June 19, 2018
Flying Aircraft Carriers – Reversed Bullets I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
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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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February 12, 2018
The Browning High Power pistol finally ends production after 82 years
Kyle Mizokami reported on this last week:
Small arms manufacturer Browning has ended production of the Browning Hi Power semiautomatic handgun. The legendary pistol served in armies worldwide, from Nationalist China to the British Special Air Service and was one of the first high capacity pistols ever invented. An invention of prolific arms designer John Moses Browning, the Hi Power was the inventor’s last pistol design.
As noticed by The Firearm Blog, the pistol‘s product page was quietly changed to include the words, “no longer in production” and the prices were removed. The Hi Power pistol was in continuous production for 82 years.
The Hi Power was the brainchild of American small arms legend John Moses Browning, a prolific inventor who also created the M2 .50 caliber machine gun, still in use with U.S. military forces today. He also invented the M1911 handgun, the U.S. military’s standard sidearm for nearly 70 years, and literally dozens of other pistols, shotguns, rifles, machine guns, and even a cannon. Browning was working on the Hi Power when he died in 1926, and the gun was eventually finished and sold by his manufacturing partners in Belgium in 1935.
The Hi Power had little in the form of commercial success before World War II, but was used by both sides during the war. Belgium’s surrender to Nazi Germany saw plans for the gun smuggled out of the country to Canada, where they were built for Nationalist Chinese forces and British and Canadian paratroopers and special forces. The tooling left behind in occupied Belgium went on to produce handguns for German military forces, particularly paratroopers and the Waffen SS. After the war the gun was sold to civilians and armed forces, particularly those belonging to NATO, and eventually more than 50 armies and 93 nations adopted the Hi Power as their standard sidearm. More than a million Hi Powers were eventually produced.
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January 29, 2018
How the U.S. got shafted out of the FN FAL
Legally Armed America
Published on 31 Dec 2017The FN FAL is one of the greatest battle rifles ever made. Politics caused the U.S. to pass on it while nearly every other NATO country in the world recognized its superiority. And the 7.62 NATO is one of the greatest battle rounds ever made. But we needed an intermediate round. Here’s the story.
* Be sure to join the web’s ONLY 100% pro-gun social community, Gun District at GunDistrict.com. It’s much like Facebook, but without the discrimination against gun owners.
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January 23, 2018
British Pistols of World War 1 I THE GREAT WAR Special feat. C&Rsenal
The Great War
Published on 22 Jan 2018Check out Othais’ YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/candrsenal
Othais introduces the standard British pistols and revolvers to Indy, including the iconic Webley series.
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January 6, 2018
THE GREAT WAR and C&RSENAL Special Hangout – Russian Rifles and Pistols of WW1
The Great War
Streamed live 6 hours agoCheck out C&RSENAL: http://youtube.com/candrsenal
Ask questions here: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheGreatWarC…
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