Category Archives: Weapons Education

Defensive Gun Use survivor speaks

This video isn’t identified in terms of who the citizen is or when the event happened. He and his wife were clearing up a rental unit in a bad section of town, when two fellows with a TEC-9 tried to hold him up and told him, “you’re gonna die.” But dying was no part of his plans. He used a ruse to distract them, drew his .40 and drilled them. Both now dwell with all good criminals, in Hades.

“When I shot him, his eyes… like he was surprised.” We guess so.

The real punch line comes at the end, when the interviewer elicits from the citizen where the criminal got the gun: it was stolen out of police custody. (This is a lot less rare than you might think, and in cities, towns and nations where civilian guns are restricted heavily, it’s probably the leading source of crime guns). You might wonder who steals guns from the police: usually, insiders. Not always sworn officers but non-sworn personnel like evidence custodians and even janitors. But sometimes, sworn officers get into the act, too.

This is not a perfect DGU, but it’s pretty good, and you can’t fault the outcome.

He trusted his sixth sense and didn’t leave the firearm on the mantel.
He kept thinking. It’s clear from his recounting of the story that his mind was racing, constantly figuring the angles. Fighting skills are built drill-by-drill with the hands and the feet and the eyes, but fights are won between the ears.
He never gave up. This is the dirty little secret to a lot of things in life.
He fired first. Fair play is for Hollywood.
He kept firing as long as the two robbers constituted a threat in being.
He put the gun down, stood clear of it, and warned the police dispatcher where the responding officers could find it.
He has some good advice for everyone: “react quickly, and have something you can defend yourself with.”

It’s unfortunate that he has given himself so much of a moral beating over killing these two specimens. It speaks well for him as a decent man and a good human being, but it’s probably not psychologically sound. He shouldn’t beat himself up: the world is a better place with those two scrotes out of it.

It’s true that everyone who kills, and is not completely lacking a moral center, thinks about it. You are vulnerable to strange stray thoughts, like, “once that guy I killed was a gurgling baby with a proud mama.” Just as it is helpful for a pilot to banish hazardous attitudes, like antiauthority or resignation, by reciting an “antidote phrase,” it is helpful for the combat soldier, or we suppose, the police officer or defensive citizen shooter, to have a mantra ready for when the humanity of the creature you have slain intrudes on your thoughts. Some examples include:

It was me or him — so I’m glad it was him. (This is close to how this shooter views it).
I didn’t kill him, he threw his life away.
If I hadn’t shot him he’d still be out there (holding people up / being a Taliban / committing general mopery in the first degree/whatever). Good thing I did.
If he did it again, I’d blast his ass even faster.
I don’t grieve when I spray ants in my kitchen, I’m not going to grieve over him. Unlike the ants, he had free will. And look what he did with it.
Think of it as evolution in action. Somebody has to put the chlorine in the gene pool.
Damn straight I’m a hero.

Every one of those can have another sentence appended optionally: Intercourse him.

There are many more like them, and they all have the advantage of truth. You should never become a psychological casualty because you defended yourself, your home, your loved ones, or your property.

We found the video here at Front Sight. That place wouldn’t be our first choice for training, but it beats hell out of no training, and it was a public service for them to post this interview.

A Formation of Liberators

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It seems like the verdict is in State Department’s attempt to do to DEFCAD what the DOJ is doing to the Associated (with terrorists!) Press and the IRS is doing to just about anybody who voices a word of criticism. And, while the East German judge gave the tactic an inexplicable 9, the Free World judges have some other things to say about USG’s attempt to stamp out 3D printing of gun parts.

Let’s start with a Liberator rendered on an older 3D Systems Cube, which is kind of like the Easy-Bake Oven of 3D printers.

Liberator printed on a 3D Systems Cube.

Liberator rendered on a Printrbot [stet]. Click any of the pictures to embiggen ‘em.

Then we’ll have a look at the way one comes out from a Printrbot. The Printrbot is even less expensive that the Cube, and doesn’t need high-$ proprietary feedstock, but it’s more complicated to set up. You can buy it as a complete printer or a kit, and there’s even a portable, battery-powered version. The smallest and simplest Printerbot kit (which you couldn’t build a Liberator on) sells for only $300.

Then, there’s the Lulzbot from Aleph Electronics. (Lulzbot? Who names these things, quasi-literate third graders?) The guy doing the Lib on the Lulzbot did his in a bright red plastic — perhaps for the Lulz. There are a number of different Lulzbots available, including some pretty high-end hardware for a hobby printer.

Liberator as rendered by a Lulzbot.

These “guns” were all in addition to the ones that Defense Distributed rendered on Stratays printers (over Stratasys’s objections and attempts to impeded and thwart their users), and in addition to the one rendered by some contractor for the chumps at the Daily Mail. (It’s a steady job, but they wanna be…). And these are only the ones already posted to the DEFCAD forums. There are more who are just making, and testing, but not boasting.

Before you do this thing, you need to familiarize yourself with the laws as well as the technology. (Technology, unlike the law, tends to get more user-friendly over time; so procrastination is your friend on the tech side. Law side, not so much).

Your gun needs to comply with the Undetectable Firearms Act (which means it needs to have 3.7 oz. metal in it) and it needs to be a Title I firearm, not a Title II weapon. If there is no rifling in the barrel, a handgun is a Title II Any Other Weapon (zip gun) and is subject to the National Firearms Act of 1934 — which requires you to get a license and a tax stamp before hitting “print” on your WhateverBot. The license requires, among other things, your fingerprints and the papal blessing of your local chief of police or sheriff; the tax stamp sets you back $200.

Some taxes are not really about raising money. (Economists call them Pigovian taxes, from one of their drear cohort who described them long ago, one Pigou).

About the technology: there are limits to the stress-bearing ability of printed plastics, and it’s considerably less than the same plastics, injection-molded (at least 20% less, for ABS). This is because the plastic is deposited in layers and is not homogeneous like injection-molded ABS would be. See, for example, the Liberator receiver close-up on the right (you can click to embiggen). You can see the layers (if you’re an engineer, you can see the stress risers!)

By the way: don’t tell Chuck Schumer or Steve Israel, but you can bypass most of the problems with a printed gun by printing it to common PLA plastic and then using the PLA part as a pattern for a mold. Add a couple of wax sprues and risers and embed the whole megillah in a plaster-sand mixture. You then melt the PLA out, and cast metal in. (Same as a jeweler’s lost-wax process, but on a necessarily larger scale). One of the real applications for these printers is in printing casting patterns (indeed, some are optimized to print wax — for just this reason).

Wednesday (backdated) weapons website: No Lawyers

Understanding Army Manual Numbers

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“Ze same vay a Cherman officer learns everytzing! From ze manual!”

OK, many of you collect US Army weapons, or have Army weapons or their civilianized counterparts (like AR-15s or M1As) in your collections. As you probably know, the Army publishes fairly good manuals about these guns, Field Manuals and Technical Manuals. Now, you can’t learn everything, unlike the German officers in Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines, “from ze manual!” but you can learn quite a lot, especially with the higher-suffix technical manuals.

Say what? Yes, there’s a code to these numbers but it’s a code you can break. Understanding these numbers will be a great benefit to you — even most soldiers, even armorers and maintenance experts, don’t understand this system.

To understand the manuals, you need to understand just a little about the Army maintenance system. The Army divides maintenance tasks by level or “echelon,” with the operator (or crew, for a crew-served weapon like a .50 MG or an M4 Sherman tank) at the bottom end and Depot Maintenance at the high end. Each higher level is authorized and required to do more. On an M16, for example, an operator can only clean and field-strip the rifle, although his unit armorer may let him replace broken handguards. The operator usually isn’t allowed do anything that would require him to apply a tool to the gun, or to remove a part that isn’t removed for normal cleaning. The Depot, conversely, can replace the barrel or any other part and completely overhaul and zero-time the rifle, preparing it for reissue as meeting new rifle specs.

In all there are five levels of maintenance, with the first two taking place at the unit level, and the top three going to increasingly remote, and increasingly well-equipped, maintenance organizations. These echelons existed in the same way in World War II as today, even though hardly anything issued then is still in the field. (The M2HB machine gun is an exception).

Operator/Crew Maintenance (also known by code letter C)
Organizational Maintenance (code letter O)
Direct Support Maintenance (formerly “Field” maintenance, code F)
General Support Maintenance (formerly “Heavy” maintenance, H)
Depot Maintenance (code letter D).

The most common Army manuals are Field Manuals, which describe Army doctrine, and Technical Manuals, which describe equipment. So while an FM covers marksmanship training, when you want to maintain or repair weapons, you’ll be playing in the TM garden. Here’s a typical Army TM number: TM9-1005-317-10. Every single digit of that carries meaning!

To decode the manual, break it down into parts. “TM” obviously tells us it’s a Technical Manual and not an FM, Training Circular (TC), Graphic Training Aid (GTA) or some other kind of publication. The 9 tells us who’s responsible for the TM.

1 — Aviation
3 — Chemical
5 — Engineer
7 — Infantry
9 — Ordnance (now called the Tank & Automotive Command, it’s also responsible for small arms)

“1005″ is a code for the Federal Supply Class of the manual’s subject. One of these numbers appears in the National Stock Number/NATO Stock Number of any item in the supply system. The numbers you’ll be most interested in with respect to weapons are:

1000 — small arms, general
1005 — Small Arms up to and including 30mm
1010 — Small Arms above 30mm
1340 — Anti-Tank Weapons
6920 — Training Aids and Devices

It’s obvious that 1005 is the sweet spot for gun collectors, including as it does every shoulder fired weapon between .22 and 30mm, and a TM-9-1005-anything is going to be useful to us. Crossing the next hyphen brings us to a three-digit number, in the case of our example 317. Now this is the identifier of the particular end item, and you have to know these numbers, or be able to look them up. We happen to know that “317″ happens to be “Pistol, Semi-automatic, 9mm, M9,” the standard GI version of the Beretta 92FS. (OK, the manual’s sitting in front of us. So, for that matter, is the pistol). The pistol’s NSN, by the way, is

1005-01-118-2640

But decoding NSNs is a question for another day, perhaps. You do recognize the FSC of 1005 is the leading segment of the NSN. All firearms will lead with 1005, unless they’re big enough to be 1010 (common examples of the latter are the M79, M203, M320 and Mk19 grenade launchers).

There’s one area left of the manual number, and that’s -10. And that’s depressing news, because it’s only the basic operator’s manual. Remember the five levels of maintenance? Yep, a dash-ten is user (operator) maintenance only. Dash-twenty’s organizational, Dash-fifty’s the depot manual.

Here’s the manual in .pdf form for download: Berreta M9 9mm TM_9-1005-317-10 The Army’s been trending away from paper pubs for 25 years, but older small arms manuals, at least, still come both ways.

Some manuals don’t end in “0″. The last digraph might be -12 (pretty common), -23, -45 or even a trigraph like -25P or even this strange arrangement: -25&P. What this means (taking the examples in order):

-12: Echelons 1 and 2, so, operator or crew and unit maintenance;
-23: Echelons 2 and 3, so, unit and direct support (WWII-era “field”) maintenance;
-45: Echelons 4 and 5, so, heavy and depot maintenance;
-25P: Echelon 2 through 5 Parts manual. This contains none of the maintenance procedures, but all of the parts (this is usually found with parts and tool lists. Special tool listings for higher echelon maintenance look promising, but the tools are listed by NSN — it’s usually a challenge to find them that way at Brownells’s or wherever).
-25&P: the ampersand indicates that this manual contains the parts & tool list and the maintenance procedures for the item in question. This is a good manual to have, if it’s published for your weapon!

Not all manuals are made for all echelons. For some small arms items, the government has negotiated extended warrantees and sometimes just sends a gun or weapon sight back to the manufacturer and lets them sort it out or exchange a new one.

And of course, not every NSN has a manual, only major end items (a replacement M9 locking block — a very popular service part — has an NSN but it’s covered in the maintenance manuals). And some NSNs, especially way-complex systems from the era of paper manuals only (the old Shillelagh missile system springs to mind) have multi-volume manuals, with the volumes distinguished by a slash and number at the end of the TM number, /1 for example.

This article draws on personal experience, but was based solidly on Chuck Ruggiero’s Armorer’s Manual, a 1998 document used in armorer training in the National Guard and elsewhere. Highly recommended, and almost mandatory for an Army armorer (even though there’s no specific training course for unit armorers, there should be, and an updated version of this should be the textbook).

One last comment: the longest-running and most bitterly-fought war the USA has ever seen has been the battle between the Army and Navy, which has raged unchecked since 1775. Thanks to that kind of interservice squabble, every service has its own manual numbering system, but because most services use the same weapons, they have for many years used same manuals, with the sole inter-service concession of up to five manual numbers stamped on each cover (see the M9 operator manual in this post for an example). Therefore, you only need to learn one system to find almost all manuals in US service.

Some overdue link love….

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If you’re not reading Raconteur Report regularly, you’re stepping on your thing. With hockey skates on. And we don’t say that only because he’s a frequent (and witty, when not fully acerbic) commenter here. We say that because we know to put down the glass of water (or other healthy beverage) before going to his site. The good news: while it’s all stuff you’ll want to read, he doesn’t have a hectic posting schedule, and an occasional check in (if you’re a Luddite who can’t make RSS go) will do ya.

Here’s a taste, from a hilarious post about what happens when a Congressman’s kid shows up — unfashionably late — at your ROTC summer camp.

He arrived three weeks into our six week tour of duty at Camp Snoopy. It was an ever-so-slightly transmogrified version of BCT for enlisted men and OCS for officers. By which, one might understand, that in three weeks of instruction by our tender loving sergeants, we could march ourselves , under student command, from Point A to point B without causing howls of laughter from enlisted men’s platoons, or getting run over by traffic, or various other sins against good order and discipline. We could dress ourselves, clean a barracks, make a bunk, field strip weapons, etc. Or, at least, 75 of us could. Out of 76. No points for guessing to which side of that divide Candidate Clusterfuck belonged.

Okay, so he’s a slow learner. What can we expect, daddy is a multi-term congressman from some centrally located state. The apple clearly hasn’t fallen far from the tree.

We may be obtuse, but the kid in question reminds of of one lawmaking nepot, well, more of a scion, who had a political career worthy of Icarus himself, before cashing a $100M plus check from a TV network that wants you dead, but will settle for you groveling abjectly to their idea of what a god is.

Read the Whole Thing™. Put down the coffee, Dr. Pepper, or undergrad jungle juice first, or prepare to buy a new keyboard or laptop. You have been warned; govern yourself accordingly.

Along with the military reminiscences, there’s some hilarious behind-the-scenes movie stuff, too. It’s a reminder than not everyone who works on movies is numb neck-up. (In fact, in our one close brush with the film industry, we were stunned by how hard those guys work. You’ll never remember the name of an assistant director — unless you’re called to help, or in our case, pitch, one. That guy had a work ethic that gave nothing up to Rangers).

Now, Raconteur Report is not all hilarious, as he’s also got first-person reminisces of the terrible Northridge Earthquake. But it’s all good, written well and worth the time — that one most precious resource that none of us can acquire more of, however big our Congresscrawler daddies might have been — to read.

Since we never did get a W4 out yesterday (“work” is a four-letter word… so is “cash”), we’re belatedly naming Raconteur Report our Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week. For the sheer humor of it.

Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week: Guns.com Reviews

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We’ve featured Guns magazine before, but for its 50-year-old archive issues. This time, we need to say a few words about ~~their~~ the reviews on a similarly titled website.

CORRECTION: this is a different Guns than the print magazine, whose website is at gunsmagazine.com. They’re the guys who have the cool back issues. Thanks to Dan in the comments! -Ed.

Guns posts six reviews a week. Once a week, they post a video review. A typical review has a description of the gun, some photographs and the results of a brief range visit or two. The reviews are not torture tests, but the site is a great way to learn about new products.

The reviews are a good way to learn about something new, for example, this budget Uberti “Hombre” Single Action. (This review is of a .45 version… as God is our witness, there was also a review of a 12-shot .22 version there, but we couldn’t navigate back to the .22 review; it’s there somewhere). The reviews sometimes have magazine-quality photos, like this one of the Uberti from that review, which is a nice thing. They’re sometimes brutally frank, like this review of an unusual pistol that just didn’t work very well, or this scathing review of a French silhouette pistol. and occasionally they’re not even about guns, but about useful gadgets. For example, they wrote up this review of a round counter — kind of a fuel gage for guns, that counts down the rounds left in your 1911, Beretta 92, or AR magazine.

(Aside: the technology is being pushed by the military right now, but the military wants both “fuel gage” and “odometer” [cumulative count] capabilities. There are good reasons for the latter — review of engagement dynamics, desire to retire guns before they’re in the fatigue failure zone or become inaccurate — and a bad reason: to give evidence to the lawyers looking to turn every gunfight into an excessive force case. The model they review is not .mil ready because its invisible under NODs).

Do we have a beef? Yes. The reviews are not consistent in the information they offer. Most don’t mention product price, which is always a concern (even the wealthy like to get value for their money). And they occasionally use file photos instead of images of the actual gun reviewed.

But in any event, no matter how well you know guns, there’s always something new coming down the pike, and chances are, it’ll show up in Guns magazine’s reviews. While you’re over there, don’t forget the back issues from fifty years ago, and throw some love to their advertisers so they can keep doing this for all of us!

The W4 this week: Guns Magazine Reviews.

Backyard gun factory — Philippines

Filipino hand-tool .45 from a gnarly backyard-shed workshop. Screen shot from the video below.

Everybody knows about the manual-labor gun laboratories of the Khyber Pass, particularly those of the Adam Khel tribe of Pathans (Pushtuns) who have plied their trade for centuries, if not longer. (Given the rate of change in this region, their forefathers probably made sarissas for Alexander the Great’s Macedonian phalanges). But the Phillipines developed a robust jungle gunsmithing tradition during guerilla wars against Americans 115 years or so ago, and the Japanese occupation from 1941-45. As Vice magazine (on HBO) shows, it’s still ongoing.

The Vice correspondent is one Ryan Duffy, whose comments and gun-handling show that he’s not exactly gun savvy. Someone give that boy some gun-safety pointers before he hurts himself.

The solitary, masked “gunsmith” says that he starts by cutting a pattern from a piece of scrap steel, and then continues until he has all the parts for pistol or revolver. It takes him about two weeks to make a Smith & Wesson .38 Bodyguard knock-off. The shop seems innocent of any heat-treating equipment or sophisticated machine tools. but may not need them for simple gun parts like those in a revolver. The gun might not pass Smith’s QA/QC metrics, but it’s good enough for Filipino wet work: according to the TV show, that often means influencing a legislative election kinetically, by shooting the opposing candidate in the back of the neck. Apparently PACs (Political Action Committees) in the island nation don’t mean quite what the term means here.

The guns from these underground workshops go to anyone who can make contact with them, and pay: people seeking self-defense, people involved in the nation’s stratospheric levels of political violence (which is the main subject of the TV report from which this is an excerpt or sidebar), and, of course, criminals.

Is this the future of gun ownership in blue states like New York, California, and Connecticut?

The Philippines now is in a paradoxical situation where locally made firearms are available, off-the-books, at a tiny fraction of the price of their factory-produced counterparts, which are unavailable to most Filipinos due to strict gun control laws. And many years after the implementation of extreme, confiscatory gun controls, there is more violent gun crime in the Philippines than ever.

Hat tip, Guns Magazine via the indispensable Gun Wire.

Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week: BBTI

Ballistics By the Inch — BBTI — is a website that does something we really like: tests and develops actual data about basic firearms facts. Like some of the other sites we’ve linked to over the last year-plus, it’s a myth-buster and a fact-finder. We do like that.

Some of these things have been extensively tested in the past, but three problems exist with these historical tests. First, the instrumentation available today tends to be more accurate than that available in the 20th or 19th Century, thanks to the computer and microprocessor revolution.

But the two other problems usually mean that those tests that do exist often are not on the net. One, perhaps they were done by government authorities that normally publicize data, but executed and recorded long before the internet’s event horizon of circa 1995. That means that they are only likely to be archived to the net if the agency cares enough to go back through its paper or microfiche archives and do so.

And two, perhaps they were done by some entity that did not care to put the information in the public sphere. Most foreign governments don’t, and companies conducting proprietary testing don’t.

BBTI’s Jim Kasper, Jim Downey and gang explain that these are only data points, and like any tests, BBTI’s have their bounds and constraints:

As we’ve noted previously, we have no illusions that our data is comprehensive. It is meant to be indicative – giving an indication to the general relationships between barrel length and velocity, or the effect of a cylinder gap. It would be impossible (for us, at least) to test all the different ammunition types available, or all the different firearms – particularly so when manufacturers of ammunition and firearms are constantly tweaking and improving their products. So use the data here to get an idea of what to expect, and perhaps as a jumping-off point for your own research.

via BBTI – Ballistics by the Inch :: Home.

Examples of the phenomena the site has examined include the effect of the cylinder-barrel gap on revolver velocity, the effect of shorter barrels on handgun velocities (starting with a long barrel and cutting it down), and comparisons of revolver velocities to equivalent-length, uninterrupted pistol barrels.

This is good data, it’s documented, it’s free, and it’s on the net. So what’s not to like? Well, apparently some people bitch about this or that. They bitch because he hasn’t tested Glocks (that’s coming). They bitch because they don’t understand the data. They bitch because… well, their psychologists could probably tell you. It’s data. It’s good. It’s free. What’s to bitch?

But with that said, we do have one quibble. In any aerodynamic or real-world ballistic experiment, you don’t have really comparable data unless you correct for atmospherics. This is usually done by correcting the data to an International Standard Atmosphere (ISA). The calculations are simple arithmetic, but you have to record the altitude, ambient pressure, and ambient temperature so that data can be normalized to an ISA (altitude Mean Sea Level, pressure 29.92 in/hg, temperature 59F). It’s possible they are doing this. This blog post, for instance, notes that they’re recording ambient temperature back in 2008. And this .pdf shows that they were thinking about pressure, but not pressure, when they originally conceived the tests. And there’s no question that they now how – Kasper’s a physicist, after all (and every drag racer figures this out — it’s not rocket surgery). It would be nice if they noted whether these are ISA value data, or provided us the ambient atmospherics so one of us readers could make the calcs.

But that’s our only quibble. Lots of information there, and more promised this spring.

A key source of historical small-caliber, high-velocity thinking

While small caliber high velocity (SCHV) infantry projectiles are a result of a very long-standing trend, with velocities increasing from the time the atlatl let the human throw a spear harder and velocities steadily following a downward path as research and enabling technology converge, most readers probably haven’t read the key documents. Many of them are linked by Daniel Watters at The Gun Zone, and formal American SCHV research (which was being replicated by researchers overseas) goes back at least as far as the 1920s.

That said, a very key document in the development of the 5.56mm M16 from the NATO caliber AR-10 was this Ballistics Research Laboratory report by R. H. Kent, The Theory of the Motion of a Bullet about its Center of Gravity in Dense Media, with Applications to Bullet Design. It This version dates from 1957, but is a reprint of 1930 report. (Thanks to Dan Watters for the correction in the comments. We guess that’s what explains why the reference round is the .30 M1 cartridge, not the WWII vintage .30 M3 ball).

One set of interesting findings from the abstract:

It is pointed out that a large value of k may be obtained by the use of bullets having light noses and it is indicated that for a given muzzle energy there will be greater energy absorbed from light bullets than from heavy bullets. The theory is applied to the effect of the caliber on the amount of energy absorbed in the medium. Itisdiscoveredthat at short ranges, the amount of energy absorbed will tend to increase as the caliber is reduced.

The paper is not fully accessible to you unless you can read sheet music (equations) and are comfortable with differential calculus. But there are insights even an MBA can find. For example, after revealing the experimental result that bullets in animal tissue perform much like bullets in water, Kent compares the effect of medium density (air or water) on the projo’s “stabillity factor,” which is a variable influenced by bullet design and spin:

“s” is known as the stability factor of the projectile. In air, near the muzzle, its value is 2 for the Cal .30 M1 bullet, but in water, near the muzzle, its value will be only 1/400. Thus, so far as our computations are concerned, it may be neglected.

He goes on from there to demonstrate that the twist of the rifling has no material effect on the stability of the projectile in the denser medium, a conclusion that is at variance with, if nothing else, early AR-15 sales claims.

But there were definite advantages to the SCHV projectile. These conclusions explain a couple of them:

[I]t may be seen that for ranges of more than four inchea in water, the greatest energy is absorbed from the smallest bullet. If the bullet were to hit an object like a bone, the smallest bullet would show a still greater superiority as far as the amount of energy absorbed i s concerned.

From the preceding discussion, it may be seen that if the caliber of the infantry rifle is reduced, that no reduction in effectiveness at short ranges will be obtained, and that in fact at these ranges the stopping and shocking power will probably increase. At long ranges, the srnaller bullets will have lost more velocity than the larger bullets and will thus have a smaller energy absorption at long ranges. This characteristicofthesmallerbullet should prove advmtageous since, at mch ranges, it is probably desirable that the bullet wounds eh&l not be lethal.

Others, of course, were flatter trajectory at shorter ranges (which happen to be the most typical combat ranges), and reduced recoil.The ultimate conclusion of Kent’s report, stripped of its bodyguard of scientific cautions:

[C]onsiderable improvement in the effectiveness of the infantry weapon may be obtained by a reduction of the caliber below that which now exists….

And of course, he followed that up with a call for — what else? — more research!

This is one of the foundational documents of 20th Century weapons science, and if carefully read, you can see the genesis of the peculiarly base-heavy 5.45 Russian round, as well as our own 5.56.

Update

This post has been updated in two ways. A correction from Daniel E. Watters has been included in the text. And we have cleaned up some messy pronoun misuse that got by our layers and layers of editors.

Syrian Jihadis Firing a .50

Here you have, perhaps, some of that nonlethal assistance we’ve finally given to Syrian resistance forces, after all the guys friendly to us were whacked by Assad or their extremist rivals, and nobody’s left to receive the goodies but guys who are either Al-Qaeda, Iranian stooges, or some new and even more extremist Islamist barbarians.

Hat tip Pat Dollard, who suggests this is “Obama sending Al-Qaeda Navy SEALs sniper rifles.” Steady on, Pat. There’s another possible explanation.

AS-50s in the hands of AI’s own shooters on BBC’s Top Gear program.

This “Syrian Resistance” propaganda video shows Syrian jihadis firing an Accuracy International AS50 semi-automatic sniper system. The AS50 is AI’s flagship weapon, and is only available to select governments; they don’t even have it on their website. (They do have the discontinued bolt-action AW50 and its successor AX50, which should give you some ideas of how they think about the extreme-range gun and its MG-sourced round).

This video (and possibly Pat’s story, uncredited?) led to a rather overdramatic article, calling the AS50 “the world’s most powerful rifle,” and attributing near-magical properties to the weapon.

The AS50 is a good rifle, but it’s not magic. It’s a similar capability to the Barrett M107 (etc.) and the Serbu BFG-50A, but at a multiple of several times the price. You could argue that it’s less powerful than those worthy guns, as it has a smaller magazine (a 5-round single-stacker, instead of the 10-shot double-stack the Barrett and Serbu share). There are claims that the AS50 is much more accurate, but if AI is making those claims they’re not making them publicly, and we defy you to find an independent test of a production AS50 on the net, let alone a comparo between it and its competitors. AI itself makes quite humble, realistic range claims for its other .50s (1600m). One AS50 strength is that it is more compact and lighter than the now-standard-issue Barrett. Lighter is relative; it still weighs substantially more than a general purpose machine gun, and three times the weight of most sniper rifles. Here’s another video (thanks again to Pat Dollard for finding it).

AI’s has had financial woes and has struggled to fill orders, even for US Government customers. Along with those customers, known buyers include the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia. While Pat Dollard was right to flag this as interesting, he’s premature to blame the provision of this weapon on the Obama Administration; Occam’s Razor suggests that the Saudis, probably the second largest financiers of terrorism after Iran (and the largest financiers of Sunni terror), are the source of the Syrian jihadis’ weapons.

Some wonder, to paraphrase Hillary, what difference it makes who wins in Syria. The Assad regime, a bona fide terror sponsor, is the face of authoritarian evil, despite the admiration that the New York literary set always has for a dictator with a good line and some visual style. And his jihadi opponents, while they squabble among themselves over fine points of Moslem supersitition, are the face of totalitarian evil — even more dedicated enemies of American interests than their Baathist opponents.

We have no friends among Islamists of any kind, and it’s more than a bit tiresome to see the same persons, news agencies, and institutions who were trying to sell the idea of “Yuri Andropov, closet pro-Western reformer” in the seventies, now breathlessly peddling “the reformers of the Taliban/Syrian Jihad/Hamas/Pasdaran/Moslem Brotherhood”, the target for the new appeasement. Or collaboration. It’s bad enough that they were unchastened by their misread of Communism; “no one could have known!” they wail, as if we who knew and were shouted down never existed. But they pronounce confidently on what Islamists believe, without any understanding of Qutb, of the Wahhabi/Salafists, or of the Deobandi movement.

They do not want peace with us. They want us to submit. Or die. In that, they are much like the Soviets. But the Soviets were materialistic and practical; these new enemies cannot, unlike Khrushchev, Brezhnev or, yes, even Andropov, be deterred. They teach murder and even death as sacraments in their blood cult.

Yet that’s who the bozos in the foreign policy establishment and the national command authority have put forward as our new allies in the region. There was a time when there was pro-Western resistance potential in Syria, but that time was squandered, and the pro-Western students and professors were the first casualties of Assad’s Baathist crackdown, any survivors the first victims of Islamist purification. They now dwell in dungeons or graves.

When the Syrian fight is over, what happens to the AS50s? Simple, they’ll be used by terrorists against US and allied targets.

WeaponsMan

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Category Archives: Weapons Education

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Update

Syrian Jihadis Firing a .50