Monthly Archives: September 2015

Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week: RSS Feeds

Some of our favorite feeds, plus our own site, shown in our RSS reader.

This is not actually a website, but a technology, and it’s one that will help you keep abreast of as many sites as you think you need to follow.

It’s RSS, which stands for Real Simple Syndication, and it’s an invisible (to most users) technology that “pushes” every post from most blogs and sites to “subscribers.” Many people don’t use this technology; when it was first introduced it was somewhat fiddly, but nowadays it’s very easy and user friendly.

You can view RSS feeds in your browser, or in a dedicated application. We use NetNewsWire, a for-pay ($10) app for Mac. It’s this simple: type the name of a site whose RSS feed you want to follow. NNW will then offer you the choice of available feeds. Most blogs let you subscribe to both posts and comments. We can’t imagine a circumstance in which we’d subscribe to comments: just the five sites on the left from our initial setup of NNW offer more posts a day than we can practically read all the time. And since then we’ve added three more site. So you can imagine how buried we’d be with comments. If you follow many more websites, you can organize the sites into folders for convenience.

Other RSS readers offer different feature sets. A great many of them are free. There are also web-based (as opposed to app-based) RSS readers like Feedly, and as we mentioned, you can set up RSS feeds in some browsers, such as Internet Explorer (if you’re stuck using that, you poor wretch).

ISIL Cures AIDS!

ISIL flag. Anybody’s guess what the circle represents…

It’s true. A bunch of ISIL goons became infected with HIV on Boy Love Thursdays (no, they totally insist it was from their kufr sex slaves, yeah, that’s it) and the Clown Caliphate has decided to cure them of AIDS, and all other earthly worries, in one big FOOM.

Islamic State militants infected with HIV from sex slaves have been ordered to become suicide bombers.

The twisted terrorists contracted the disease from two Moroccan women they had captured.

Now at least 16 of the militants have been told they must blow themselves up, reported the Daily Mirror.

“Islamic State leadership is planning to assign suicide attacks for its militants who are tested positive with AIDS,” a civil rights activist in the city of al-Mayadeen in east Syria said.

“Most of those infected are foreign militants who had sexual intercourses with two Moroccan women.

“The women passed on the disease to the militants before their infection was revealed.”

The men are now being held in quarantine before they are forced to meet their fate.

“We were ordered by the group’s local leadership to transfer the infected militants to a quarantine center in the city,” said a Syrian doctor.

via IS order HIV-infected militants to blow themselves up – NY Daily News.

Great. It’s bad enough to worry about these ‘splodydopes crashing one’s parties, but now you have to treat the post hoc frags of splodydope as biohazard.

When Guns Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Boats.

As the echo of one of Murphy’s favorite expressions, FOOM!, fades away, we open with the sound of rotor blades as critically-injured children are life-flighted to a hospital and a chance of survival…

The children were airlifted to D.C. Children’s Hospital after the 20-foot boat caught fire on Mill Creek in Lusby, Md., about 60 miles southeast of Washington, D.C, Maryland Natural Resources Police spokeswoman Candy Thomson told the Post.

The incident happened around 11:30 a.m., just minutes after the family had launched from the marina, Fox5DC reported.

A three-year hold [sic] and nine-year-old were being treated for severe burns at the hospital. Their eight-year-old sibling was also hospitalized.

via Three children burned after boat explodes in Md. | Fox News.

Say what? What happened? Something drastic needs to happen… for the children! But we need a better story. The Washington Post to the rescue, sorta:

Thomson said the cause of the explosion and fire is still under investigation, but said the boat burned and sank very quickly.

“Witnesses said they heard a boom and when they looked the engine cover was up in the air,” Thomson said. “The boat burned and sank very fast.”

The boat was launched out of a private slip in the 12500 block of Rousby Hall Road. Mill Creek, where the explosion occurred, is a tributary of the Patuxent River.

A FOOM! right after launching. Hmmm, what does that remind us of? We know! You know when they told you in boat school to run the blower to evacuate any inflammable fumes from the bilges before firing up the boat? Oh, you didn’t go to boat school?

Well, actually, you just did. Boat school, spelled FOOM. We can’t help but think the classroom way is easier.

Some Rare Russian Patrol Plane Footage

One of the most thankless Jobs in World War II aviation was that of the maritime patrol pilot. No glory there, just long flights over water — usually, deadly cold water. And usually in airplanes that were sitting ducks for anything else in the air.

While there has been a little written in English about the RAF Coastal Command, and about American patrol pilots flying the Consolidated PBY, there hasn’t been much information about other nations’ patrol planes and their crews. The Japanese and Germans of course suffered defeat, which scattered their veterans and archives; and the Russians took military secrecy seriously, even though they were behind their peers in this particular field. Not only are there few stories, but few artifacts surviving from this unglamorous but vital field of warfare: most nations’ fighters are represented in museums, but all patrol planes left is grainy black-and-white pictures.

Russian crews too flew patrol flying boats on the nations Arctic and eastern coastlines. Their equipment, like the MBR-2 flying boats seen in this video (silent video with music dubbed over, unfortunately), and the 7.62mm single-mount DA machine guns that the flying boats’ defensive gunners used, was more dated than Russian fighters. They seemed to make up the difference with tough guys, hanging exposed in the cold slipstream.

It was only after the war that the Soviet Union would make an amphibious flying boat as modern as wartime American, British, German or Japanese planes, the Beriev Be-6 (Nato Madge). Its successor, the Be-12 Chaika (Nato Mail), continued to operate long after the Americans, British and Germans gave up on flying boats; indeed, a handful of Chaikas may still be in Russian service. They are, if so (and were, if not) the last conventional gear (tailwheel) aircraft operated by a superpower. (Japan and China, as well as Russia, continue to develop flying boats The sheer size of the Pacific encourages use of such machines).

First Documented Successful 3D Printed Revolver (&c.)

Yes, we’re still in early phases with additive-manufactured firearms, but the technology is coming along, as are the users.

Washbear. This is an early version with tension bars (in red on the cylinder, retained by the cylinder’s black end caps).

Big News: Working 3DP Revolver

Proof of firing video:

What you just saw was a 3D printed, legal, double-action-only revolver firing six shots of live ball ammunition. This is the culmination of a lot of effort by a lot of people, not least Yoshitomo Imura who is doing three years in an unpleasant Japanese slammer for firing blanks from his original design. Through many iterations, 3D revolver and pepperbox design has improved until it’s reached the current state of the art, which is called the PM522 Washbear.

FOSSCAD writes:

The PM522 Washbear DAO .22LR Revolver by James R. Patrick. AFTER YEARS OF TRIAL AND ERROR we have the WORLD’s FIRST 3DPRINTED DAO (Double Action Only) Revolver!!!!!!!! WOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOO! With the body of the Songbird Pistol and an Imura-esque Cylinder and trigger system, this baby hold 6 dataloving shots of 22LR made for consistent shooting with a removable cylinder for easy reload. OH YES WE CAN!!!!!!! We are refining the recipe and will be releasing CAD VERY SOON! For now we have a lovely test video proving that this baby works!!MOARGUNS!!

Washbear in its case. Cylinder is designed to be an expendable part.

Patrick is an engineering student; his own site is purported to be here. However, access is blocked by our antivirus software: “Access has been blocked as the threat Mal/HTMLGen-A has been found on this website.” We were able to view the text on the site by looking at the Google cache of the site.

washbear printed cylinders Cylinders in particular received a lot of trial, error, and trial again. The initial cylinder design took 20 hours of printer time to produce. (Who was the wag that called this technology “rapid prototyping,” and where can we get a case of whatever he was drinking?). Another iteration (see the green cylinder in the upper left) used the 3D printed part as an outer shell and filled it with epoxy resin; this is the “fill compositing” technique developed by Belter and Dollar at Yale and published in PLOS ONE.

Design for the resin-filled cylinder.

Best one so far has metal chamber liners. Here’s what Patrick says:

Here’s a summary of the different cylinders we’ve tried:

The original multi-part cylinder with tension rods didn’t hold up. It fired two shots and cracked on the third, which deformed the cylinder enough to jam the action. The tension rods actually sheared cleanly at the point where the bullet exits the casing.

So we tried making the tension rods thicker. On that version, the tension rods survived firing but the cylinder still cracked.

So then we tried my resin-filled ABS idea. That one fired six shots, but was too damaged to reuse.

So I made a version with no tension rods and I tightened up the headspace, hoping that the front and rear of the cylinder would contact the frame when fired and the frame would take the pressure. FP has printed this version in Taulman Bridge (a nylon filament) and it awaits testing. He also modified that design to accept steel chamber liners.

It was printed on a Rostock Max, a deltabot-style open-source printer that’s popular with hobbysists for its open-source nature, large print area, and reasonable cost.

Washbear frame printed on the Rostock Max.

Much more information at the IMGUR page, and in Patrick’s website, if he can get it de-malware’d. Anybody’s guess what government agency did it to him?

What It Takes to be a Gun Design Engineer

From time to time, people, especially young people, ask this question. We’re not gun design engineers, although we’re fascinated by their work; we’re, relatively speaking, dilettantes.

So when we got a chance to see a real job listing for a real senior design engineer to do real firearms design, our first thought was to share it with you guys and gals. (Well, actually, our first thought was… “Crap. We’re not remotely qualified.” But our next thought….) Anyway, here is the list of prerequisites:

Education and Experience Requirements

Four year degree in physical engineering required. Mechanical engineering preferred.

5 plus years related experience in an engineering environment required. Manufacturing environment preferred (firearms manufacturing is ideal).

Duties require effective verbal communication skills, visual acuity to product details along with drawings and computer screen data, and the physical ability to work and move in a factory environment.

Firearm Design Experience Required

Ability to work cross-functionally internally and externally.

Knowledge/experience with SolidWorks CAD system preferred.

The job is with a large, publicly held company (Vista Outdoor, the sporting spinoff of ATK), and the benefits package seems decent. Note that they don’t want an operator-boperator, gun-plumber, or machinist. They want a design engineer who can work on the screen and then go on the shop floor to find out why the parts don’t match the computer file. “SolidWorks preferred” but we bet if you came from a CATIA shop they’d still snap you right up if you met their other prerequisites.

Note that they’re looking for a degreed engineer, but not a PE. That should help narrow down what they’re planning to pay for this guy.

What will a Senior Firearms Design Engineer be doing? Here’s what the listing says:

Responsible for the design and development of new firearm products. Duties include development of concept print/plans, design of products, tolerance specification, and other similar duties pertaining to product design.

What about some specific duties?

Develop and design new company products.

Develop and produce concept prints, plans, drawings for new products and/or modifications/enhancements to existing products. Design features and functions for the products.

Specify materials, dimensions and tolerances, inspection standards, etc. for the components and parts.

Develop details drawings.

Oversee and guide projects assigned to less experienced design engineering personnel.

Keep abreast of developments in the market. Review competitor’s designs and products.

Analyze market place requests, customer requirements, etc.

Analyze company ability and desire to meet requirements and/or requests and make appropriate recommendations to management personnel.

Maintain a working liaison with other departments and engineering sections. Provide support for sales personnel to contribute technical assistance to customers.

Assist QA personnel provide technical support for vendors, develop inspections for parts, and/or to qualify vendors.

Work with other engineering units to resolve problems, develop processes, etc.

Perform other similar duties as required by responsibility or necessity or as requested.

The downside? Well, it is at Savage in Westfield, Massachusetts; there are nice places to live around there (apart from the politics and outside the inner city, it’s Norman Rockwell’s America) but it’s a very expensive place to live, with staggering taxes; and MA is a Brueghelian environment for a gun guy these days. (And it gets worse every time the gun control pols’ constituents shoot each other up in Roxbury and Mattapan).

Three possibilities here: someone left Savage one key designer short, perhaps during last year’s layoffs; the company is about to get a bunch of investment earmarked for new products; or Savage managers see the opportunity to poach some talent from a struggling neighbor (cough Colt cough).

If the job sounds like it you want it, you’re qualified, and Westfield isn’t all that impossible for you (like, because you’re currently 40 minutes south in equally anti-gun Hartford?), then “apply online at www.vistaoutdoor.com to Job ID: 29438,” as the listing says.

Remember that a lot of the industry is located in anti-gun places, but it’s moving gunwards every year, and success in this job would open doors in many other manufacturing plants in our industry. (That’s one reason why you will always see competitors treating each other with regard and respect at industry shows — apart from the fact that gun folks tend to be polite folks. It’s a small industry, in people terms, and yesterday’s competitor is tomorrow’s colleague).

Savage is also looking for a senior quality manager. We leave digging up the details of that job as an exercise for the reader.

When Guns are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Buses

Luis Inoa never knew what hit him. That’s because he was knee-walking, commode-hugging drunk, and staggering around in the traffic lanes of a major Bronx road.

But we know what hit him: a Bronx Nº 1 bus.

The cab pulled over near a bus stop at the corner of W. 231st St. and Kingsbridge Ave. and let the desperate passenger out just as a BX1 bus drove up behind them, cops said.

“He saw the cab driver open up the door,” said Frank Austin, Transport Workers Union Local 100 official, referring to the bus driver.

The MTA driver veered into the westbound lane to avoid Inoa, who bent over to vomit and then suddenly staggered out into the street and was struck by the right side of the bus, officials said.

“Next thing he knows, somebody was screaming at him to stop the bus,” Austin said, referring to the MTA driver.

Inoa, who was struck by the bus’ rear right wheel, died at the scene.

via Man, 23, dies after drunkenly staggering into Bronx bus path – NY Daily News.

Inoa was just a year out of college, and working for the Nickelodeon TV network. He chose to celebrate a promotion by drinking himself into insensibility, and with his senses dulled by such quantities of Judgment Juice that his very organism rebelled, rejecting the fluid, stumbled drunkenly into the traffic lanes for a rendezvous with death.

Tragic? Yes. Stupid? That, too. Many deaths of young people are both.

You know, if we banned buses this wouldn’t happen (we’d say, “if we banned alcohol,” but that’s been done). If it just saves one life…?

Lie, Deny, Stonewall, Play Dumb: VA Leaders Go To the Capitol

If you’re a Congressional committee chairman, you can get high-handed VA bureaucrats to come to you. But you can’t get them to come clean. Ron Johnson, R-WI, summoned key figures from the VA’s corruption cover-up to the Capitol building, but they were largely unresponsive to an irate bipartisan group of Senators who were looking for specifics, and especially some sign that someone at VA would be held accountable for the multiple, interlocking, metastasizing scandals. They would be disappointed. The bureaucrats were nearly as contemptuous of the Senate as they are of their supposed clients, the veterans.

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-MO, said she has introduced legislation that would require the termination of any employee who retaliated against a whistleblower. She asked [Dr Carolyn] Clancy [the VA’s Chief Medical Officer] how many people had been fired pertaining to this issue.

Clancy said she didn’t know…

Her office’s documented attacks on whistleblowers were not her concern. And let’s face it, we know how many VA hacks have been fired for misconduct related to whistleblowers, some of which we’ll document below: zero. Zip. None. Nobody.

No, she’s not worried about punishing those who punished the whistleblowers. But that’s not to say she has no worries:

…but had concerns about the bill.

“I worry about more fear on leaders,” she said. “They feel like if someone raises their hand and something goes wrong, they are worried they are losing their job.”

via VA officials used medical records to smear whistleblowers – Watchdog.org.

Ah, that’s the concern. Not that any of the underperforming, corrupt hacks might be corrupt and underperforming. But that some of the underperforming, corrupt hacks might actually be fired for being underperforming hacks.

Yep, at a hearing where Senators wanted to hear what the VA was doing to correct its mistreatment of vets by bad managers, Carolyn ~~McCarthy~~ Clancy, MD, the Chief Medical Officer of the VA, had only one concern: that the job entitlement of the bad managers not be put at risk.

Deputy Inspector General Linda Halliday — the IG slot is vacant and has been for almost two years, showing how high-priority the VA isn’t — was also evasive and nonresponsive when questioned by Senators. When not using the Sergeant Schultz Defense (“I know noooothink!”) and said she only had been on the job three months. She hadn’t seen an IG report sliming a whistle-blowing psychiatrist. She didn’t know who wrote it.

Both Clancy and Halliday said retaliation against whistleblowers is unacceptable.

But 100% of whistleblowers have faced retaliation — often by Halliday’s OIG — and a lot of them have been sacked under false pretenses. Meanwhile, 0% of retaliators have lost their jobs. One thing Halliday’s OIG has systematically done is to access employee medical records unlawfully in search of pretexts for firing whistleblowers: this has been OIG SOP.

The OIG is tasked with investigating complaints of fraud and abuse. But testimony showed it was complicit in covering up VA mistakes instead of ferreting out wrongdoing. Whistleblower Shea Wilkes testified that he was placed under a criminal investigation by the OIG for accessing a secret wait list at the Shreveport VA Hospital in order to provide evidence that such an event was happening. He talked to 50 other whistleblowers across the nation and found that “100 percent of them have had their medical records accessed” to fabricate reasons for dismissal.

Read The Whole Thing™. And get mad.

Update:

This post has been corrected. The name of the dud Chief Medical Officer who worries not about the vets she left to die but the executives who might lose their jobs was incorrect in our commentary (it was correct in the quoted text). We regret the error. Thanks to all of you who read and post corrections in the comments, it’s appreciated.

Body Cam Footage: How Not to Release It

We have said that dash and body cams, as much as they creep officers out, save a lot more cops’ skins than they put at risk. (On the other hand, the military approach, where the eye on your forehead is being watched in the FOB, in Tampa, or in DC and desk jockeys from all those zip codes are murmuring advice in your ear, is not so good). But having a recording of what cops do from their own point of view is a life- or at least career-saver, and a primo slayer of conspiracy theories.

That’s because most cops do follow their training in interaction with the public. While there may be times they err, being, loath as the public is to give them the credit sometimes, human, most of the time the video shows that the cop was in the right. And the story the suspect or his survivors cooked up of poor li’l Dindu Nuffin bein’ set upon by Da Man is, how shall we put this? Horse puckey.

So the best thing to do, when you have a clean shoot, is to release the video early and often. Let the it-bleeds-it-leads ghouls on local TV have their blood meal. Let the relatives’ story of a “police assassination” be compared to video of a snarling nut-job charging cops with a knife.

Or you can botch it completely like the New Hampshire Attorney General and the state Supreme Court did in the case of the suicide-by-cop of a mentally ill man, Hagen Esty-Lennon, who charged two Haverhill, NH cops, Greg Collins and Ryan Jarvis.

What they ultimately did, egged on by Dindu Nuffin’s wife who wants to pretend that her whackadoodle husband didn’t functionally kill himself, was release the videos with the actual shooting redacted. So all it shows is Hagen Esty-Lennon’s agitated, crazy behavior. Then during the shooting you have the audio of Esty-Lennon being ventilated by multiple shots from the cops’ Smith & Wessons.

And then lots of audio of the chaotic aftermath that’s commonplace after a shooting.

One of the videos is above. Three more are at the New Hampster Union Leader, which was forced to sue for the videos — while the Dindu Nuffin clan spread nonsense about how their guy was heartlessly gunned down. For no reason. And thanks mostly to the AG, the agitators have been handed a video that they can continue to claim shows a bad shoot.

Of course, the AG is one of those individuals who has much more sympathy for criminals and their families than for the cops who spend their days trying to keep a lid on these people.

It gets worse. The very redaction they demanded, they’re now using as “evidence” of a “cover-up.”

Facts we can tell from the video:

The guy was acting irrationally
The guy had a knife.
The guy had previously injured himself with the knife (that’s what the red stain is).
The guy threatened the cops with the knife.

Everything else is speculation. But there’s nothing here that makes Esty-Lennon look like anything but one of those wretches who’s out on the street only because there are just not enough rooms with neoprene wallpaper, nor any working mechanism to send the nut jobs there.

Someone’s Flogging His Big Johnson

Of course, you can’t have it if you’re in Libya, North Korea, New York, New Jersey or Massachusetts because it’s a big assault Johnson, but what it is, is a rare Johnson LMG kit, restored onto a semi Johnson M1941 rifle receiver, producing a legal semi-auto Johnson LMG. And you can have it — if you win the auction.

Manufactured on the original Johnson 1941 semi auto receiver , using original US GI LMG parts , semi auto only . Excellent condition , park. military finish ,mint original barrel , beautiful wood furniture. Test fired only. The gun fires , extracts and reloads 100% , very accurate. The gun comes with bipod and 3 magazines. Shipping to an FFL or C&R holder. The gun will be shipped from FFL in PA.

via 1941 Johnson LMG light machine gun semi m1941 : Semi Auto Rifles at GunBroker.com.

There are a number of these around. By “a number,” though, we’re probably talking about a single digit number. The parts kits are rare, and the rifles are valuable enough to collectors that it’s hard to make the case for sacrificing one.

Johnson guns get their collector cachet from their rarity¹ and their use in training and combat by elite elements including the Paramarines, the Marine Raiders, the Canadian-American First Special Service Force (all ephemeral, hostilities-only WWII units), the OSS, and Brigada 2506, the Bay of Pigs invaders. The Marines and Cubanos only used the rifles; the FSSF, only the machine guns. Any surviving Johnson has some part of this history.

Because the Johnsons were not standard arms with standard doctrinal spare parts and maintenance support, they were withdrawn and replaced with US standard rifles and auto rifles/LMGs. Carefully packed away, all of them except for probable OSS/CIA stocks were surplused after the war.

We don’t know what it will go for. The current bid in the $8k neighborhood has not met the reserve (the rifles sell for $4k and up). Some comments, and the rest of the photos, after the jump.

Notes

30,000 Johnson M1941 rifles were made, a large percentage of which survive, but only about 3,000 were machine guns according to ATF Form 2s filed by Johnson Automatics. The Johnson M1944 machine gun appears to have been produced only in prototype quantities.

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