One of the least covered, but quite serious, insurgencies in the world is that in Mali. The Francophone nation in West Africa has, since its founding, had an uneasy mixture of disparate peoples. The black Africans in the south, a national majority who have dominated Malian politics and institutions, don’t blend with the Arabs and Tuareg of the north.

The Tuareg in particular have been fighting for over fifty years for independence from Mali. The Malian Army is a typical African military: cheerful good intentions met by low cognitive ability all round and an absolute lack of technical and tactical competence. The Malian Joes are willing enough, SF trainers from 3rd (and occasionally 20th) Group have found, but they have a long way to go.

The Tuareg, a nomadic race with a warrior culture, took their show on the road into gun-rich but politically collapsing Libya, and came back armed to the teeth. But they were already armed to the teeth, and after rolling up some Malian Army garrisons, were even more so. The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point reported in the CTC Sentinel:

Although much has been made of the Tuareg rebels’ return from Libya via northern Niger following the collapse of the Qadhafi regime, this circumstance more helped to reinvigorate a stalemated conflict than was itself the raison d’être for the present war. Although Tuareg fighters returned from Libya with fresh stocks of small-arms, ammunition, fighting vehicles, and anti-aircraft weaponry, they also accessed weapons stockpiled from previous outbreaks of political violence and raided arms depots abandoned by retreating Malian troops. A press report described the Malian army weapons acquired by AQIM in Gao as a “vast cache.” (This report ran in AFP on 27 May 12 — WeaponsMan Eds.)

There is evidence that the third source of weapons—those that rebels either never surrendered in previous bouts of secessionism or gained in the years leading up to the 2012 war—also likely forms a significant amount of arms in the current conflict. Ensconced in the rugged Tigharghar Massif due south of the Algerian border, Tuareg rebels then led by Iyad ag Ghaly and the late militant leader Ibrahim ag Bahanga began as a movement called the Alliance for Democracy and Change (ADC) on May 23, 2006, when it mounted attacks on army garrisons in Kidal and Menaka in which they acquired a large trove of weapons.

Another foreign policy website attempts to place the Tuareg rebellion in a historical context here.

MNLA rebels rockin’ the PKM and AKs. The MNLA was driven out of Timbuktu by the Islamist factions.

The rebels refer to their separatist homeland as “Azawad,” but are divided between nationalist and jihadist-Salafi groups. The balance of power recently shifted when the leader of the largest nationalist group, the Ansar Eddine, became radicalized and now supports extremist Wahabbi/Salafi islam. That leader is the above-referenced Iyad ad Ghaly. This group (sometimes transliterated as Ansar Dine) has also fought with the secular, or at least less-Islamist, Tuareg rebels, the MNLA.

Ad Ghaly’s conversion opens up yet another source of logistical support, including financial and weapons: the world network of Islamic terror financiers. Funds donated expressly for terrorist support make up only a percentage of the haul. A large percentage is donated at mosques worldwide as alms, ostensibly for the poor. Almsgiving is obligatory for faithful Moslems; it is one of the five pillars of Islam. Diversion of these funds to jihad happens at several levels, and is rationalized several ways. Many of the alms givers are comfortable with the notion of their donations spreading the faith, means notwithstanding. Others have been exposed to skillful and pervasive jihadi propaganda. These messages depict terrorist groups as plucky resistance fighters seeking to overcome oppression of the faith.

Mali government troops in their Land Rover match the PKM and raise the stakes: M2HB. Nice guys, but if they can’t exploit the political and ideological faultlines between the factions of their enemies, they could finish last.

Along with arms funded by jihadi auxiliary networks, there is also the possibility of state sponsorship, although no sign of such for Ansar al Eddine or the other Malian groups has yet appeared. In the past, nations as diverse as Egypt, Jordan, Libya, Pakistan and Iran have provided arms directly to Islamist irregulars. Pakistan and Iran have factories which have in the past produced sterile, deniable weapons for insurgent and terrorist use.

We can expect to see more of the Malian rebels in the news. One feature of Islam, of course, is its iconoclasm, in the literal sense. With the rebels in control of the ancient seat of learning at Timbuktu, they have embarked on an orgy of destruction of tombs and shrines (a feature of Sufi Islam that Wahabbis consider shirk or polytheistic idolatry) and have threatened to destroy the libraries of early Islamic documents there.

In an apocryphal tale of the burning of the Library of Alexandria, a Moslem warlord is alleged to have said: “If the books there contain the same information as is in the Koran, they are redundant: burn them. And if they contain information that is not in the Koran, they are heresy! Burn them.” Ansar Eddine leader as Ghaly is reported to have said something eerily similar about the ancient manuscripts of Timbuktu.

So to recap, where did the Malian insurgents get their guns:

1. From stockpiles kept since previous unrest;
2. From the collapsed military of a failed state next door;
3. Battlefield recovery from defeated or deserting government troops, and;
4. From abandoned or uncontrolled government arsenals. There are also two other possibilities, which we’ll call
5. (speculative) purchased with jihad donations; and
6. (speculative) presented by state sponsors of terrorism.

There are many paths by which motivated people can arm themselves. Guerilla logistics are sufficiently flexible and resilient that a wise counterinsurgent attacks not the easily replaced secondary targets of arms, supplies and other logistical nodes, but the primary target: guerilla motivation.

Another day, another bozo writes an inept column about firearms technology. This could become as boring a subject as wannabees. In this case, a writer named Mark Gibbs at Forbes has his panties in a bunch over the Have Blue 3R AR-15 we’ve previously covered. Here’s a taste of his sky-is-falling Luddism:

I’m in favor of tighter gun control and a ban on weapons that are unnecessarily powerful but I’m afraid that technology will soon make any legislation that limits the availability of any kinds of guns ineffective.

via The End of Gun Control? – Forbes.

Gibbs seems to have come to this opinion, as is typical for mainstream media guys, without ever looking at the primary source document — which he rudely, or ineptly (pick one), doesn’t link. (FYI it’s here: Have Blue). Instead he links to several superficial third-hand reports, and as a result his report is chockablock with errors, a few of which have been corrected.

For instance, the printer Have Blue used is not a $500 entry-level toy — it’s a high-end Stratasys, albeit an obsolete model. “A few years ago 3D printers were rare, hugely expensive, and hard to use,” Gibbs writes, which is a pretty good description of Have Blue’s roughly 15-year-old device (a fact he’d have known if he’d been curious enough to read the primary source or — God forbid a reporter would do this — contact the guy).

As a technology writer, Gibbs finds the next logical step in his ban plan, to ban 3D printers, to be a ban too far… so at least he’s concerned about civil liberties when they’re his own. What a guy!

What’s particularly worrisome is that the capability to print metal and ceramic parts will appear in low end printers in the next few years making it feasible to print an entire gun and that will be when gun control becomes a totally different problem.

Well, he has this going for him: weasels never soar, but they’re safe from getting sucked in to jet engines.

Just a few relatively simple pieces. Nothing to it, right? … Er, wrong. Click on through to the video to get an idea of the thorny details of realizing these parts. Image: Forgotten Weapons.com

Ian has a great video post at GunLab on how what looked like a simple project to make a simple add-on, one that has already been proven and manufactured in large quantities in at least two countries, can be hard to do. What looks like a simple piece can be a challenge for CNC machining, when it was designed for the machine tools and manufacturing processes of another day.

The RP-46 Company Machine Gun (Russian, transliterated: Rotny Pulemyot) is essentially a DPM light machine gun with a belt feed grafted on, which gave the 1920s design another thirty years of life.

With the proliferation of semi-auto DPs and DPMs, it seemed like a conversion kit would be easy enough to do. The parts illustrated here are from an original RP-46 examined in a post at Ian’s other website, Forgotten Weapons.

As is common with his posts (and increasingly, ours, for which we are most grateful) one can learn a lot from the comments, also.

…Monday, we will.

Thug (Henderson, r.) menaces patrons (l.) Williams is behind the man in white at upper right center.

This is a good shoot:

Williams was seated toward the back of the cafe dressed in a white shirt, shorts and baseball cap.

One of the masked men, identified as Duwayne Henderson, 19, comes in pointing a handgun at customers. The second man, Davis Dawkins, 19, is seen swinging a bat at something off screen, which was later identified as a $1,200 computer screen.

Williams (2nd r.) engages a surprised Henderson (thug, far r.)

As Henderson turns his back, Williams pulls out a .380-caliber semi-automatic handgun, stands from his chair, takes two steps, nearly drops to one knee, and fires two shots at Henderson, who bolts for the front door.

Williams takes several more steps toward the door and continues firing as Henderson and Dawkins fall over one another trying to exit the building. The two eventually run off screen.

The whole thing: Ocala.com. Video at the link.

This is a bad shoot:

LAKE COUNTY, Fla. – Lake County Sheriff’s Office deputies shot and killed a man they assumed was an attempted murder suspect on Sunday, but they now know they shot the wrong man.

In the early-morning hours, deputies knocked on 26-year-old Andrew Lee Scott’s door without identifying themselves as law enforcement officers. Scott answered the door with a gun in his hand.

“When we knocked on the door, the door opened and the occupant of that apartment was pointing a gun at deputies, and that’s when we opened fire and killed him,” Lt. John Herrell said. “Even though this subject is not the one we were looking for when he opened the door. He was pointing the gun at the deputy and if you put yourselves in the deputy’s shoes. They were there to pick up someone who was wanted for an attempted homicide.”

Officials said the deputies did not identify themselves because of safety reasons.

Deputies thought they were confronting Jonathan Brown, a man accused of attempted murder. Brown was spotted at the Blueberry Hills Apartment complex and his motorcycle was parked across from Andrew Scott’s front door.

“It’s just a bizarre set of circumstances. The bottom line is, you point a gun at a deputy sheriff or police office, you’re going to get shot,” Herrell said.

Read more: WESH.com.

It’s worth noting that Herrell’s story has changed several times since the shoot, and he now says that the deputies didn’t ID themselves because they were afraid the suspect would flee. (The idea that beating on a door without ID’ing yourself was for “officer safety” has received a lot of ridicule).

After shooting Scott, the cops spent an hour and a half celebrating the killing of their suspect before they discovered that they’d nailed the wrong guy — they had ignored neighbors to that point; after all, citizens are not cops, so they might as well be criminals — and that the right guy, Brown, suspect in an assault, was sleeping nearby. He was arrested without incident, by police who actually identified themselves in the process.

The shooters remain unidentified: only that they’re police. Secret police. They have been given a paid vacation for the duration of the investigation.

There are people who would insist that the first shoot is bad, but they’re mostly the people who would excuse every action of the skells in the case, and who are emotionally opposed to private firearms. They are wrong. The only real criticism of the guy is for his stance, and for his use of a minor caliber. We do know some guys his age that can’t manage the recoil of a .44 Special or ,45 Auto any more, though; age deals different people different cards, if they’re lucky enough to outlive youth. One of the suspects actually whined to a sympathetic reporter, from jail, that it was no fair shooting him.

And there are people who would insist that the second shoot is good, but they’re mostly the people who would excuse any action by police in any circumstance, and who are emotionally opposed to holding bad cops accountable. The right anwer in this case is a legislative one: authorities should not have sovereign immunity for wrong-door violent raids. Instead they should face joint, severable, personal and unlimited liability and from that point on the fine folks in the tort bar can keep them on the straight and narrow from a public policy standpoint. (An unchecked tort bar is a different problem, and the answer there is loser-pays).

Note also that the police unions always defend the bad cops. If they defend good cops, they don’t seem to get in the papers for it. Purpose of a police union seems to be to support those guys who should be on the other side of the steel bars.