Category Archives: Unconventional Weapons

Don’t bring a gun to a sword fight

3D Printed Gun Update

kB!’d and fresh Liberator receivers in ABS plastic.

When we last left Cody Wilson and Defense Distributed, specific files had been taken down and Wilson was being threatened with criminal prosecution for publishing these files online.

But developments in the case have not let up, and are continuing around the clock — now on two continents, at least.

You may be forgiven for thinking Wilson is the victim of not just a runaway bureaucracy, but a political abuse of power. He has an unusual political outlook, one that makes it easy for the political class in general to label and dismiss him. But he’s reasonable, not paranoid; and even paranoids may have real enemies.

Events of the last few days — when it appears that baseless IRS audits have been used to punish such disparate political activists as “tea party” groups, deficit critics, and Jews supportive of Israel — make one suspect that the State Department attempt to cut 3D printed firearms off at the knees is cut from the same totalitarian cloth.

Even if it isn’t, it’s still kneecapping next-generation industry, which is something Washington in general (both parties!) tends to be rather good at. The 3D printing revolution has been one of the most interesting developments in years, and it has a lot of applications to both hobby and production gunsmithing. (Did you know you could 3D print in PLA resin and then use the printed part as a pattern for a lost-resin casting in aluminum or iron? Why is anyone dicking around with plastic parts, then?)

That’s why we follow it… for the technology. But the human drama is also compelling. Here is Wilson, today, defending his decision to comply with the takedown order:

A few have criticized how quickly I responded to the DDTC and began participating in their regulatory process. It is said I should have stood and fought if I believed in keeping the files free, instead of complying. This compliance has been viewed as some kind of ultimate one, as if I don’t intend to do anything else.

…

Now the demonstration is over, and the hard work of having all our rights preserved is just beginning. ITAR might cover 3DP technical data for generations if DD doesn’t intelligently challenge this assertion of authority.

via WikiWep DevBlog..

As one might expect for an aspiring lawyer, Cody Wilson has got counsel assisting him on this one.

Daily Mail reporters snuck this Liberator through the Rapescan machine in the Eurostar terminal.

In a related story, Britain’s Daily Mail tabloid printed a Liberator and took it aboard the Eurostar train. A great deal of pearl-clutching has ensued… of course, in Britain, handgun possession is already a serious offense.

Update 1815R

“3D printing can destroy the spirit of gun control itself,” Cody Wilson told the New York Daily News. Interview and photo at this link.

Weapons of the Boston bombers

A shattered lid from a 6 liter pressure cooker. Image: FBI

A shattered lid from a 6 liter pressure cooker. This was part of one of the finish line bombs. Image: FBI

We started a small fire in comments with our early criticism of the police — a criticism that cop readers argue is based on misunderstanding what they should be doing in the immediate aftermath of a bomb — and have come around to have a great deal of respect for what the law has accomplished. While we were tied up in that, others on the net began to figure out what went bang.

Joe Huffman, who we’re told has amateur experience with pyro and deflagration (black powder, Tannerite), thinks its a low explosive/homemade explosive, or a deflagration. We’ll try to restate his basic argument in a couple of lines before giving you the whole thing: the duration of flame means that the combustion time was measured in seconds, not milliseconds; therefore the bomb was not made of a stoichiometric mixture (one that contains fuel and oxidant in perfect measure), as it would be if it were pro explosive. His argument in full:

See all that flame? And it looks as if there is still fuel burning in the cloud two seconds after the explosion.

I’m almost certain that no commercial or military explosive produces that much flame. Something like that would be totally banned in the mining industry.

That may mean there was a great excess of fuel in the explosive composition. Boomerite has an excess of oxygen which makes for easier detonation. Maximum power comes from a balance of oxygen and fuel. Some explosives are naturally oxygen or fuel rich. For example TNT is fuel rich. During WW II they would add ammonium nitrate which is (under the proper conditions) an explosive that is oxygen rich. The excess oxygen in the AN increased the power of the detonation by consuming the excess fuel of the TNT.

With that much flame persisting that long after the explosion occurred means huge amounts of power was wasted in light and relatively slowly expanding gases. This was not a military grade explosive. Getting the most bang for the least weight is worth the cost of getting the oxygen balance right.

This means it’s a homemade explosive.

Another possibility is that it wasn’t really a detonation at all but rather a deflagration. For example gun powders typically do not detonate. They “just” burn very rapidly. The flash you see at the muzzle of your gun at night (and sometimes even in bright sunlight) is composed mostly of burning particles of gunpowder. Confine the powder in a strong closed container, such as a pipe, and you get an explosion when the container bursts.

via Boston explosives | The View From North Central Idaho.

Joe’s argument is based on the only evidence he then had, the videos and photos; he didn’t have the images of pressure cooker parts, which of course comport well with his theory. Our experience of HE is that there is flame involved (especially the newer, less practical variants with ATF-approved taggants), but it’s momentary. However, cameras and videos can exaggerate the amount and duration of the flame.

Still, take on board Joe’s suggestion that it might have been a deflagrant (like black powder), and note the investigational development that says the bombs were contained in pressure cookers. That would be the perfect pressure vessel to contain a deflagrant until overpressure burst the vessel, turning its parts into shrapnel. This is a widely used jihadi weapon; as we’ll get to, it’s a signature of certain terrorist groups, but all these guys share their information widely, and this type of bomb has been widely reported in both jihadi and Western press, so based on the bomb alone couldn’t rule out individuals stricken with sudden jihad sole-practitioner syndrome, or a non-moslem copycat.

Joe updated his post with a link to this analysis by Rick Boatright, which confirms based on calculated flame-front speeds that the bomb was a low order deflagration, ratherthan a detonation.

So, in 0.02 seconds, the flame front expanded about 10 feet, or about 500 feet per second (340 MPH). The speed of sound in air is about 1100 feet per second, so this is a sub-sonic deflagration not a detonation. (It’s still a bomb, and still an explosion but the stuff making the bomb BURNED andd the wave-front of the burning moved out through the explosive at less than the speed of sound. It was very fast, but it didn’t go off all at once.)

So, this is the result of a “low explosive.” High explosives detonate at 3 to 9 kilometers per second and produce sonic or super-sonic wave fronts.

In terms of being an “IED” and being a “terrorist improvised explosive” the bomb was probably -not- TATP for two reasons: TATP is a high-explosive, so it would have gone off all at once, rather than burning for many hundredths of seconds. In the New York Times You-tube video cited above, flame can still be seen in the cloud from the explosion until timestamp 70.5. – the combustion continued from 69.7 to 70.5, almost eight tenths of a second. That’s burning, not detonation.

More thorough versions of these calculations will be done by the FBI bomb experts investigating the blasts. Several witnesses commented on a “gunpowder smell” or “fireworks smell” but none of them distinguished between the smell of smokeless and black powder, at least as far as we have read. Black powder is far more likely to be involved — it’s more widely available, and superior to any smokeless powder for this purpose. It’s also homemade relatively simply, although homemade black powder will be weak compared to that commercially available.

The Pressure Cooker Bomb

Other pressure cooker (and containing bag) remains of the bomb planted by Tamerlan Tsarnayev. FBI.

The bombs used at the Marathon, and the bomb thrown at police during the Friday night firefight, were pressure cooker bombs. The bombs appear at first glance to be identical, having had a simple timer, a homemade explosive or deflagrant filling, all packed into a six-liter pressure cooker inside a nylon duffle bag or backpack. Components of all of these, including one largely intact pressure-cooker lid, were recovered from the scene of the blasts. The lid was found on a roof across the street from the blast.

Pressure cooker bomb from Inspire Magazine. Click to embiggen.

Pressure cooker bomb how-to from Inspire Magazine, July 2010. Click to embiggen.

The pressure cooker, of course, is the ideal pressure vessel for a bomb loaded with a deflagrant rather than a high explosive. Here’s the DHS warning of pressure-cooker bombs in 2010, and here’s the a large .pdf of the July 2010 Inspire magazine (Al-Qaeda’s magazine for would-be members with Sudden Jihad Syndrome) that describes how to make such a bomb. This link will take you to all issues of Inspire in captivity.

This kind of bomb is very widely used in Southwest Asia, especially in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir. It was in the mid-oughts a signature of Pakistani bomb-makers and their trainees, and is often used by the TTP and by various ISI-sponsored terrorists in Kashmir. In that part of the world, pressure cookers are more common than in the USA (more of our homes have ranges with burners and ovens). But successful jihad approaches are quickly disseminated by AQ’s and other jihadi groups’ internet propaganda machines — Inspire magazine being a perfect example of the methodology.

The pressure cooker bomb has been employed in the United States before. It was used in the Times Square, NYC bombing attempt. with consumer firecrackers as the explosive filling. That bomb failed. The individual who planted that bomb was Pakistani-trained.

The pressure cookers were filled with a deflagrating charge, as we’ve discussed, almost certainly black powder, and shrapnel (nails and ball bearings or BBs). The source of the powder in the bombs is, at this time, unknown. FBI bomb experts are leading the investigation into this part of the case.

What about the guns?

The investigators are being mum about the guns employed by the bombers, but at least three guns have been recovered: one with the corpse of Tamerlan Tsarnayev at the Friday night shootout scene, and two in the boat-bilge rathole into which Dzhokar wormed himself. At least one of the guns had crudely defaced serial numbers, but investigators are confident they can recover the number and trace the guns as far as they went in lawful commerce. But the guns were not lawfully sold to, or possessed by, the Tsarnayevs. Under Massachusetts’s strict gun laws, they could not have bought them legally. (This is not a novelty. In the state. About 200 murders take place a year, and about 200 of them are committed with stolen or black-market guns. It is extremely rare for a legally-owned gun to be involved).

A Massachusetts State Police source informs us that neither Tsarnaev brother had a license to carry, which is required in the Bay State to purchase pistols and so-called “assault rifles” legally. (There are different “classes” of LTC for different purposes. All are de facto “may issue” permits, and municipalities have unfettered discretion and may interpose any additional requirements that amuse them). Dzhokar would have been ineligible for such a permit because he was not yet 21. Tamerlan would not have been eligible because he was a legal permanent resident, not a citizen. (Disarmament of legal aliens has been overturned by Supreme Court precedent, but the law has gone unchallenged in MA). In any event, the city where they lived, Cambridge, prides itself on not issuing permits, except to the wealthy and politically connected.

So the good news is: if the Feds utterly botch their prosecution of Dzhokar, he can still get the mandatory two years per gun for possession in Mass. However, the state normally does not enforce this law against violent criminals, only against otherwise law-abiding citizens who break the malum prohibitum gun possession law alone, and somehow offended police, politicians, or other officials.

Their most probable sources are the criminal black market, first, and secondly, associates at the extremist mosque that both attended and that is a key to their radicalization, the Islamic Society of Boston’s satellite mosque in Cambridge. The ISB is a wahhabi/Muslim Brotherhood group; it’s directly controlled by the Muslim American Society, the overt arm of the Ikhwan al-Muslimeen or Muslim Brotherhood in America. The Brotherhood’s founder Sayyid Qutb is also the father of Sunni extremist terrorism and inspired Hamas and al-Qaeda. Under the circumstances, the very liberal governor of Massachusetts, Deval Patrick, retracted an unwise invitation to an ISB imam to officiate at a memorial service for the victims of his adherents’ violence — the indirect victims of his own murderous message.

Things Investigators are Learning

A bomb contains many signatures. Bombers do what has worked for them before. Even a detonated bomb leaves clues by which it can be reconstructred. (The FBI has been reconstructing bombs used on airplanes from 1956 to Pan Am 103, despite what looks to a layman like the complete destruction of all evidence. The PA 103 reconstruction was a model of scientific assistance to law enforcement and intelligence). Different explosives affect metal, concrete, glass and human victims in distinct and distinguishable ways. These are a bomber’s tracks, as distinct to a bomb expert as animal sign to an Indian tracker in a James Fenimore Cooper novel. And the timer, if any, and detonator, are also extremely strong indicators a to the source and purpose of the bomb.

The Last Word

We’re seeing a lot of bending over backwards to See No Evil in this case. But the evil is there for all to see. We know who did it. We know how they did it. And we know, despite all the posturing and hand-wringing, why they did it. We don’t know all the details and we haven’t seen all the facts, and we don’t know who all the enablers were.

We do know enough to make those who tried, thanks to wishful thinking, to hang this on their political opponents and (in the case of media types like Wolf Blitzer) their critics. Wolf, just because we think you stink at delivering the news doesn’t mean we want to blow random people up. We don’t even want to blow you up. If somebody was to blow you up, or anyone else for that matter, the percentages argue pretty strongly for someone who attends worship services on Fridays that involve banging his forehead on the ground.

Not all moslems are terrorists. And not all terrorists are moslems. But if you bet the percentages, that’s the square to put your chips on, every time. Or you could do something really radical and wait for the evidence to come in. The irony is that the media rushed to judgment, until the evidence came in refuting their judgment, and now they are anxious to give the actual perps the benefit of the doubt.

Follow the evidence where it leads. Hang the guilty. Leave the innocent alone. Those concepts used to be enshrined in our laws and culture.

Tom Thurman (ex-FBI) on Bomb Forensics

We’re at the stage now where there’s a lot of speculation — most of it uninformed — about the Marathon bombs. The typical journalist just follows his muse and makes something up, like CNN’s Wolf Blitzer did yesterday. The better journalists find someone who knows what he’s talking about, and print what he says — even the warnings to avoid speculation.

Joe Pappalardo of Popular Mechanics did that. The expert he found was professor and retired Bureau bomb investigator Tom Thurman.

Thurman knows a lot about bomb investigations. Before his retirement from the FBI in 1998, Thurman was the chief of the FBI Bomb Data Center; he also worked Pan American Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland; the bombing deaths of a federal judge in Alabama and an attorney in Georgia, both in 1989; and the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York.

The first thing to do is to determine if the explosions were intentional. “What’s there that could spark an accidental explosion?” Thurman asks. If no likely sources for an accidental detonation are found—like a buildup of flammable vapors—the investigators start looking at other evidence.

Of course, even Pappalardo can’t resist the lure of early information, which is very likely to be BOGINT:

The Boston Globe is reporting via Twitter that a third device was found, unexploded, that police are detonating intentionally. So the fact that the scene in Boston is a mass homicide is now obvious.

We would have said that trash cans don’t generally contain things capable of spontaneous explosions, and that’s why we thought an attempted mass homicide was obvious. And we also would be leery of the media on twitter. During the course of the day, the Boston media reported that there were two, three, five and seven bombs, that the police had defused two, that the police had destroyed two in controlled detonations, that the police were blowing up the hundreds of backpacks abandoned by injured and fleeing persosn. Most of that is bullshit, and any of it that isn’t bullshit, is only factual by the sheerest happenstance.

And the worst offender in local media is the Globe. It’s a farm team for the New York Times, and its reporters have little local interest and few local sources. Most of them don’t even know anybody that’s not an Ivy League grad, which pretty much guarantees you can’t converse with Boston cops.

Twitter has given the media, which already prized primacy over accuracy, an even more uncontrolled hipshooting tool. If the Globe tweets sunrise, start worrying about Earth’s orbital mechanics.

Fortunately, Pappalardo returns to letting his informed source speak:

Video will be crucial to determining what happened in Boston, much more than the laboratory analysis, Thurmon says. “They will be looking at how the bomb got there: who deposited it and when.”

Even the video of the blast can help identify what kind of bomb it is—or in the case of Boston, confirm that the bombs that detonated were the same that went off. “Generally, white smoke means a commercial explosion or improvised device,” he says. A common chemical used in these bombs, in the United States and abroad, is acetone peroxide (TATP). It comes in a white powder and blooms in a white cloud when it explodes. In Boston, the initial images seem to show white smoke blossoming at the moment of explosion.

Triacetone Triperoxide (TATP) is very easy to set off, very easy to make (although difficult to store), and does not have any peculiar precursors that are easily interdicted or monitored by law enforcement (unlike, say, ANFO). However, other possibilities, including a smokeless-powder pipe bomb, have to be considered. Most media reports are still speculative, fabricated, or mistaken, and even early official reports are often wrong. (All of these early errors, mostly resulting from the media’s preference for speed over accuracy, will be heard from again: they will be conspiracy theorists’ “evidence” that a cover-up is happening, and actually all they prove is that the media suck at their job).

Industrial and military explosives emit black smoke, Thurman says.

If the video proves inconclusive, there are other ways to figure out what happened. One main question is whether it was a suicide bombing or a remote-control device. “There is a very discernible difference between the injuries of a suicide carrier than of other victims,” Thurman says.

This question, at least, seems to have been answered. Not a suicide blast.

Re-creating the injuries will help determine the direction of the shrapnel, and help locate the epicenters of the devices—and that means detailing injuries to living victims and examining the deceased, he says. Human bodies that are hit by shrapnel have evidence in their bodies. All that information should be chronicled by investigators, on the scene, in the hospital and morgue. Residue of explosions needs to be collected and sent to the lab—devices can be tested in the field for their composition, but residue cannot, Thurman says.

We still don’t have any credible information on whether other devices were or were not found, and whether or not these devices (if any) were defused or destroyed. (If it were a highly unstable device, like a homemade TATP bomb, they’d probably rather blow it in place… the evidentiary value of a defused device has to be weighed against risk to human life.

Thurman ends on very good advice for everybody:

He cautions not to be too hasty in assessing blame. “Let the evidence direct us,” he says. “We need to have an open mind. This could have been anybody.”

via Bomb-Blast Forensics: The First Steps – 2013 Boston Marathon – Popular Mechanics.

Unique weapon, quiet defense

Know your enemy. A single virion of variola major.

The New York Times has an uncharacteristically good report on a biodefense issue yesterday. This is a field in which we have toiled off and on for some years. While most soldiers don’t like to think about bioweapons, terrorists are drawn to their low cost, low signature, relatively easy distribution, and high potential effect.

Of the myriad natural organisms that biowarfare experts study, a half-dozen cause the most concern, and even among those nasties (including anthrax and the hemorrhagic fevers like ebola) one pathogen stands out: smallpox.

The smallpox virion is tiny, as weapons go (it’s actually big, as viruses go), but its ability to hijack the human organism to reproduce itself and to spread from human to human through the air is at least on a par with that of the flu. And unlike common flu, against which humans generally have robust immune defenses, smallpox is extremely destructive, disabling and ultimately killing about a third of the infected, and leaving another third alive but disfigured.

A smallpox victim in the pustule stage.

Most people alive today have never seen smallpox. The organism was the first ever deliberately made extinct by a team of World Health Organization experts in 1978. That team was a model of international cooperation. The original idea came from Soviet (!) physicians, but the actual eradication effort wound up being led by American D.A. Henderson, who is quoted in the Times story. As the paper accurately recounts, he WHO tightened the noose around the virus’s gradually shrinking natural reservoir by learning about outbreak and quickly forming an impenetrable ring of vaccinated humans around the infected.

Smallpox, you see, is unlike flu in one important way: it infects nothing but humans, so it has no animal reservoir. Wipe it out in people, and you make it extinct. (Diseases like monkeypox and cowpox are only loosely related to variola major, the smallpox virus — not like the way the same flu virus can make birds, pigs and men sick).

With the flu virus extinct in the wild, the WHO asked labs to destroy their research stocks — and most did. Two labs deliberately kept samples of the pathogen, with the understanding if not approval of WHO. One was the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, and the other a Russian research institute (the sample is now held in Vladivostok, in the Russian Far East).

In addition to these known samples, unknown stocks are suspected or known to exist. For example, a defector from the Russian offensive biowar program reported work with smallpox, and three developments since the 1990s have made the organism a worry again.

The first is the rise of mass-homicidal terrorism. Those guys want something like weaponized smallpox so badly they can taste it. (Hmmm, awkward metaphor, that). But with only a couple of samples in the grip of tight American and Russian security, they can’t get it, right? Well… the second development is the absolute conviction that certain offensive and defensive bioweapons programs retained variola major samples. These include some nations you would suspect of such a thing (Iran and North Korea) and some you might not (Israel and China). Some people who have this conviction hold it based on logic, some on the basis of access to intelligence information. Let’s go with logic for a second here. If you were Israel, would you want a doomsday weapon, and a deterrent, knowing that Iran is developing an offensive BW capability that lurks in the shadows behind their more visible nuclear weapons effort? Or would you just work on defensive measures, and “turn the other cheek?” (Tip: that Biblical line is from a book that the Israelis reject as canon).

But a sample only gets you so far, because it’s a virus, and viruses are a special form of parasite: they can’t grow, or reproduce, except in a host cell. And the only host that works for variola is you and me. Right? Well… maybe. That brings us to the third set of developments, which is the advance of medical and biological technology since 1978. Certainly we would not have been alive if we’d only had 1978 medicine available, and so would many others like us. But the liberation of the genome — human, animal and pathogenic — and developments in genetic technology, while they still fall short of enabling Jurassic Park (dang), make it possible for a small lab to, theoretically at least, reanimate the extinct virus, possibly by assembling its DNA and then stuffing it in the protein envelope of one of those loosely related viruses, and tinkering.

That’s not the only double-edged medical development. US Army scientists, looking for a way to test vaccines and antivirals ethically, succeeded (if that’s really the word) in infecting non-human primates with variola major (from the CDC sample). It was hard, but they did it, and there’s now an animal model for this formerly exclusively-human disease. (The scientist who did it, a brilliant man, was headhunted away from USAMRIID — the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases – by the Department of Homeland Security, which spent billions erecting a duplicate lab and needed someone to run it).

But these developments add up to less confidence that we would not be biologically attacked than we had in the Carter Administration, and definitely than during the Yeltsin years, when the Russian offensive biological program was suspended. So the government designed a two pronged defense: first, stockpile the proven vaccines (there’s a good one, and a so-so one that can be given to the few people who are allergic to the good one). Second, develop and purchase antivirals. That’s where the Times thumbsucker comes in, because it’s basically questioning the need for the antiviral and their cost — over $230 a dose, and the USG is stockpiling tens of millions of doses. The Times gives both sides of the argument space to make their points — D.A. Henderson, the guy who killed this bug the first time, makes an appearance, and the other bio guys interviewed for the article are the real deal. Read The Whole Thing™.

But the Times being the Times, their blinders prevent them from seeing the actual reason that the CDC met the offeror’s price without negotiation or quibble, and happily signed the contract: the owner of the vaccine factory was billionaire Ronald O. Perelman.

Here are Mr Perelman’s campaign contributions to January 2012, a list to gladden the heart of about half of Americans. In 2012, he opened up and let the other party wet their beaks, too. Obviously he’s a great humanitarian and his asking price must be met. It couldn’t be just a case of belatedly bipartisan crony capitalism among all these noble New Yorkers.

It took ten seconds to look those contributions up… something that the Times “layers and layers of editors” couldn’t shift themselves to do. On the other hand, despite the visible effort and serious old-fashioned reporting that went into the piece, they got one guy’s name wrong. Still, it’s worth reading. The bug fighters don’t get enough credit, even when they’re wasting millions to make Ron Perelman richer.

XM25 kaBOOM!

XM25 in a posed beauty shot. Army photo.

We’ve heard that two separate XM25 Counter Defilade systems (25mm semiauto “smart” grenade launcher have blow’d theyselfs up lately in live fires, one in the USA and one in Afghanistan in February, and that the weapon’s been taken out of service while engineers try to walk back the failure tree. Ishikawa diagram, ho.

Both operators were lightly injured; both weapons were destroyed. The design of the weapon is pretty fail-safe in the way it directs energy away from the gunner (which is good, because as a bullpup its breech is just about under his cheekbone, as you can see from these file photos).

XM25 at a technology display. Note size of weapon, and location of breech.

A second round field test with a batch of improved prototypes only just started in January. The new batch have not fired a shot in combat yet (the one that blow’d up in Afghanistan did it on the range).

ATK, the manufacturer, is trying to figure out what went wrong. There were no such kinetic malfunctions with the first batch of prototypes, which had a generally successful combat deployment. (The problem was not the weapons themselves it was the lack of just-right targets to show off its unique capabilities. Instead, they were mostly used for suppressive fire).

We’re trying to get our hands on the safety-of-use message and of any incident photographs.

Cuomo’s gun ban prevents all crimes

Like this one, in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The victim was saved by fast-thinking and -acting firefighters from FDNY Engine Company 9:

Ming Guang Haung, 28, was arrested on Sunday after he allegedly used a meat cleaver to hack and slash at his wife.

“He pulls a cleaver out of his waistband and starts hacking at this woman. I rush him, I try to grab the cleaver, but he’s swinging six, eight, maybe ten times,” firefighter Jose Ortiz said.

Ortiz, ran outside and grabbed the man, sending his weapon flying.

“We finally get him down on the ground. The lady that was hurt, she bolts. (Fellow firefighter) Shane (Clark) follows her, because I told him, ‘You’ve got to follow the lady, because she’s hurt,’” Ortiz said.

Firefighter Shane Clarke chased the woman to a restaurant nearby on East Broadway.

“I ran up to the commotion, and I could see that she was bleeding heavily all over her body, and so I ran back, I grabbed a trauma bag, and at that point, she was sprinting down the block,” Clarke said. “I think she was panicked, more than anything else.”

The 23-year-old woman was taken to Bellevue Hospital. She was initially reported in critical, but stable condition, and later in serious condition, with lacerations to her face, back and hip.

via Police: Man Attacked, Critically Injured Wife With Meat Cleaver « CBS New York.

What do people like Cuomo think? When guns are outlawed, or just not handy in the moment, criminals will magically transform into blithe, lotus-eating spirits? The evidence of our experience is that the individual who opts for crime will use any weapon available to him that meets his threshold of lethality.

You know, like a meat cleaver.

Kamikaze Para-mice counterattack invading snakes

The Japanese landed by sea in 1941. They were dislodged the same way in ’44.

The last invaders who had to be driven out of Guam were the Imperial Japanese Army. But the famously tenacious Japanese couldn’t hold a candle to the current crop of invaders: yard-long brown snakes that have denuded the island of its native bird life and made numerous native species, both avian and terrestrial, extinct.

Appropriately enough, the snakes’s coming D-Day is going to be a vertical envelopment, and all weapons are at hand. In particular, a quirk of herp biology leaves the snakes vulnerable to biological warfare: they can’t handle acetaminophen (Tylenol), and so heliborne scientists plan to drop baby mouse carcasses laced with the common anti-inflammatory drug.

The snakes are not only a problem on Guam, but they stow away on planes to distant places.

Dead mice laced with painkillers are about to rain down on Guam’s jungle canopy. They are scientists’ prescription for a headache that has caused the tiny U.S. territory misery for more than 60 years: the brown tree snake.

Most of Guam’s native bird species are extinct because of the snake, which reached the island’s thick jungles by hitching rides from the South Pacific on U.S. military ships shortly after World War II. There may be 2 million of the reptiles on Guam now, decimating wildlife, biting residents and even knocking out electricity by slithering onto power lines.

More than 3,000 miles away, environmental officials in Hawaii have long feared a similar invasion – which in their case likely would be a “snakes on a plane” scenario. That would cost the state many vulnerable species and billions of dollars, but the risk will fall if Guam’s air-drop strategy succeeds.

“We are taking this to a new phase,” said Daniel Vice, assistant state director of U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services in Hawaii, Guam, and the Pacific Islands. “There really is no other place in the world with a snake problem like Guam.

via US gov’t to air-drop toxic mice on Guam snakes – DC Breaking Local News Weather Sports FOX 5 WTTG.

Sleeping-Ugly here is the villain of the piece: a brown tree snake.

The airborne mice won’t be coming by parachute; testing has determined that cardboard streamers decelerate the mice well enough that they don’t spatter and lose their snake appeal (the brown tree snake is a rare snake that will scavenge dead animals), and they’re less fiddly than parachutes. Some biologist, though, gets to be the lucky duck flinging the dead meeces — each one gets launched snakeward by hand, for reasons that seem clear to us: mouse-throwing machinery is not an entry in the McMaster-Carr catalog, after all.

There is one difference between the last counterinvasion and this one: in 1944, the US Army, Navy and Marines planned the invasion of Guam for a couple of months (including a one-month postponement caused by stiffer than expected resistance at the previous invasion, Saipan). Being that the snake attack is not a military operation, but a more typical government job, it’s been in the planning and preparation stage for over a decade.

Our money’s on the snakes.

Silent sans Silencer

Saving the man, or easing his pain, was beyond the surgeon’s art. A surviving portrait shows a man with a shaven head and large nose, peering through pince-nez glasses over a splendid mustache and small beard… having somewhat the affect of 1970s John Lennon, but his gaudy decorations are rather grander than any that man sent back to the Queen, and date the wounded man to the last age of empires.

He had been struck with handloads containing poisoned bullets, and his assailant had then killed himself. “Why? Why?” the agonized victim moaned. He had done what he thought best. One of an urban elite, placed in office by the lawful authority of his nation, he’d used a campaign of what today’s urban elites might call “common-sense gun laws” to suppress a seething native culture the elite considered retrograde but — with a firm hand — educable. He meant to stamp out a shadowy underground, the Activists, but they scored first.

He was dying. His name was Nikolai Bobrikov, and he was His Imperial Russian Majesty’s governor of the independent-minded province of Finland. After Bobrikov’s death, the province grew increasingly unsafe for His Majesty’s officers and, especially, the Finnish quislings who enabled their rule.

While Bobrikov’s assassin, Eugen Schauman, used a Browning Model 1900 handgun and bullets containing elemental mercury, a backup Activist assassin, Lennart Hohenthal, was in place that day. Hohenthal was equipped with the Activists’ secret weapon: a rifle containing cartridges specially loaded to be as nearly silent as possible. Each contained a lead ball, a primer, and a very small powder charge. The result was a weapon deadly at short range, and all but silent. With regular cartridges, Hohenthal was also capable of self-defense at longer range, if need be. Hohenthal’s backup was not needed that day. Later he would assassinate the highest-ranking Finnish quisling, the Procurator General Ekiel Soisalon-Soininen, and make an epic escape from the Ochrana, the Tsar’s cruel secret police.

Handloading of low-signature rifle cartridges has been “a doubtful bustle” in Finland since the very first years of 20th century. Amongst the first pioneers of special-purpose handloading was the very most valiant National Hero of Finland, EUGEN SCHAUMAN, who executed detestable Russian governor-general NIKOLAY BOBRIKOV with an explosive mercury-filled ? bullet from his BROWNING pistol model 1900, and committed a suicide with next two shots, in the June 1904. Schauman died instantly. Bobrikov languished many long hours, moaning in Russian: “Pochemu..? Pochemu..?” “Why..? Why..?”.

Before his death Eugen Schauman was a member of the ACTIVISTS, a troop of daring Finns who planned to release Finland from the Imperium of Russia – by fighting with firearms, if necessary. There were obtained in 1902 some Swedish 6.5 x 55 mm MAUSER/-96 rifles and as early as in 1899 the WINCHESTER Model 1894 hunting rifles of caliber .25-35 WCF, for elementary training of the riflemanship and maintaining of the marksmanship by the regular target practice, but also for elimination of the most detestable Russian officials in Finland — and their Finnish collaborators — of course. As high-ranking Russians sycophant as an Attorney General, ELIEL SOISALON-SOININEN was executed, along with some police chiefs, but all of them were eliminated with handguns. These capital punishments were executed after death of N. Bobrikov and Eugen Schauman.

Governor-general Bobrikov was fully authorized dictator in Finland since 1903. Among his very first dictations was “A Gracious Act On The Registration And License-compulsion Of The Rifled Fire-arms”. Those compulsions were applied to rifled shoulder arms only, including the “gallery rifles”, chambered for .22 BB Caps or similar pipsqueaks, known as FLOBERT rounds. Shotguns and handguns were free from registration or license-compulsion. Then-modern military rifles, like Swedish Mauser, were especially risky to possess and use on the outdoor shooting ranges.

Noise of the target practice became a problem. There were some models of the suppressors invented in 1903, but they were not yet produced, except a bulky “sound deadening device” of W.W. GREENERs “Humane Cattle-Killer”; a slaughtering tool. Logical solution was handloading of “silent without silencer” cartridges. Eugen Schauman developed them, or at least he gave information about low-noise loads with lead bullets and the “blue powder” by his letters to the activists all-round the Finland.

via Gunwriters Handloading Subsonic Cartridges, Part 2.

Reduced-charge 7.62 NATO and others, using wool wads to prevent detonation (Image: The Firearm Blog).

That page and site has a great deal more information about the “silent sans silencer” loads of Finnish freedom fighters. What ties them to Schauman, even though his ultimate deed was done with a different set of special-purpose handloads, is that he was a prolific developer of silent handloads.

They called them “kissan aivistus” or “cat’s sneeze” rounds, and each one had a primer and a greatly reduced powder charge. They were loaded with round lead balls, or with jacketed or cast bullets, sometimes reversed to fly base-first.

There is a side-benefit with some reduced loads. It is possible for a jacketed bullet to set so weakly into the rifling that matching it to the rifle afterwards is impossible. It is also possible for a cast or lightly jacketed slug to be spun so fast that it is for all intents and purposes explosive due to centrifugal force. These bullets have unconventional and clandestine warfare utility that should be obvious, and the loads require little beyond a Lee Loader (it’s actually better to only neck-resize the cartridges).

The optimum reduced load, then is a “cat’s sneeze” that is sufficiently accurate for head shots at 100 meters, functionally silent at that range,

Experimenting with such reduced charges is not without risk.

One friend and colleague of an author, a highly educated Finnish gunwriter, did not believe on warnings that the Secondary Explosion Effect (S.E.E. — also known as the Reduced-Charge Detonation) is possible with sub-minimum charges as small as 0.2 grams = 200 milligrams = 3.1 grains with a force, able to wreck a good quality .308 Winchester rifle. One full gram of the very same powder behind the same kind of bullet may be completely safe charge. The friend almost lost his eyesight, despite of the safety goggles he bore.

This can be somewhat ameliorated — to the imperfect extent that SEE is understood — by using a filler such as Dacron or wool to fill the empty space left by the reduced charge.

The specific reduced loads mentioned in the article are of but small use to us today: they rely upon powders that were available to reloaders in Europe anywhere from decades to a century ago, but the suggestion is to use very hot, fast-burning pistol powder. One would probably want to do round development with a chronograph, and in a gun one didn’t mind losing.

Schauman is an interesting character, quite legendary in Finland and quite unknown in the Anglosphere. His sister lived a long life — she was a talented painter and an art critic — and wrote a loving memoir of him, long out of print and only available in Swedish. One of the great ironies of Schauman’s rebellious, short life is that, while he is a Finnish national hero, his family spoke Swedish — and Russian, because his father, like Bobrikov, was an officer in the Imperial Russian Army.

Schauman himself was the author of the Activists’ reloading guidelines.

For the entire, wide-ranging article in three parts by Finnish gunwriter and reloading guru P.T. Kekkonen:

It is not the most logically-organized article you’ll ever read, but it is interesting.

A Scandinavian-history web page has a little more English-language information on the assassination of Bobrikov and on Eugen Schuman. Recommended by the same page is this article from the Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat (it may take some time to load, for US users) on the centenary of the 1904 assassination. Today, the present neutralist Finnish government denies its own citizens a chance to view the fatal staircase, and deprecates the memory of the once lauded Schauman.

The Past is Another Country: The Fire Book, 1584 A.D.

We’ve explored a few old sources here, under our The Past is Another Country category, but we don’t think we’ve gone this far back before. Through the good graces of the University of Pennsylvania — egads! We’re saying good things about one of the gormless-DOD-suit-producing Ivies — we have the Feüer Büech, an Old or Middle German version of the 1970s hippie mischief manual, the Anarchist’s Cookbook.

It’s one of the treasures of the Penn library, and is considered “Manuscript Codex 109.” They have a photographic, full-color facsimile of every page online. The default of the image is 1/8 normal size, but you can blow them up to full size if you like.

The library site also provides vital meta-information about the book. It is a handwritten, German cursive script document with about 22 lines per text page. There are 235 pages and 34 illustrations, two of which seem to have been cut out of another book and pasted in (remember, in all history before Gutenberg, books were handcrafted, expensive, and rare treasures. It’s surprising there isn’t more such recycling in evidence). The Feuer Buech may be related in some way to another Fireworks Book that’s held by the State Library in Berlin, and that one may date to 1420.

(Given the impermanence of things made by the hand of man, and what’s happened to Berlin over the past century, it’s astounding that this older book has survived).

Lavishly illuminated with what appear to be watercolors, it’s what a book was when they were ultra-valuable, one-off, hand-copied items. And this one is right up our alley: it’s the medieval equivalent of a demo and pyro manual!

The accessibility of the material is somewhat limited, unfortunately: it’s written in a medieval version of fraktur script, and in an archaic version of German. So at first it’s hard to figure out what letters spell out the words, and then once you think you have succeeded in that, you may have a word that is not a cognate of its modern German analogue. Decoding such a text is rather a tough bit of work. Fortunately, there are illiustrations.

Occasionally, a heading is clear enough. For example, the one on Page 16 r. promises that the text below will explain “Das Ziel der büch,” the objective of the book, but we’re not at all sure we’re breaking out the sub-head clearly: “To explain, how a halberdier develops a knowledge of fire and learns how to test that fire out.” (Probably every single detail of that is wrong).

Unfortunately, it does not seem that there’s an online transcription of this work easily discoverable. Since we can hardly be the first ones interested in this ancient codex, and odds are some of our predecessors have a better knowledge of old German script and language than ours (which is functionally nil), then there has to be scholarship on this document out there in the medievalist community. Yes?

Fire arrow

One of the many interesting illustrations is this fire arrow, on a page hand-numbered 83. A conical base of the arrow serves in place of fins, to move the center of pressure aft and provide stability. The arrow appears to have been made of all metal (which makes a certain amount of sense, as it’s supposed to be a host and delivery means for flaming stuff), and we’ll also say it does not appear to be the sort of arrow one would nock and fire from a longbow.

The incendiary material is tightly bound high and low to the arrow, and fluffs out in the middle. Our best guess is that this was meant to be fired from some kind of arquebus, in the sense of that word indicating a crew-served, large crossbow. As most of these weapons were constructed from wood and rope or rawhide, firing flaming stuff from them must have been interesting.

The cannoneer

The last illustration is a man loading a cannon: a hint of things to come. It’s hard to deduce too much from the illutration, which falls far below the aesthetic and proportional standards of classical antiquity’s art, but it’s possible that it represents a brass or bronze barrel with iron bands, mounted on a surprisingly modern-looking field carriage. Powder kegs, cannon balls, and loading and swabbing tools would have been familiar to any gunner from the age of muzzle-loading cannon, all the way to the second half of the 19th Century. It’s hard to tell if a curious structure on the dorsal aspect of the breech of the cannon represents a touch hole, or something else.

Several illustrations of men like this one show them carrying sticks with primitive cannon fuse on the end, and having what appear to be cloth “matches” hanging on their clothing.

The medieval era was not, as is commonly supposed, bereft of thought and common sense. In fact, a great many social institutions that still shape our society (for instance, the university) began then. Middle-ages mobile and siege warfare, far from being a pale imitation of classical antiquity, was highly developed and sophisticated.

Hat tip, the Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal, who warns us: Do Not Try to Recreate This 16th-Century German Cat Bomb at Home. The cat-incendiary is similar to fire-animals noted in a number of period manuscripts, creatures that would sometimes be released by hand and sometimes actually catapulted over walls with siege engines.

Good ideas never die, but that’s probably because bad ideas never do, either. The Russians cooked up a weirdly analogous weapon in what they called the Great Patriotic War: the dog mine. It was hard on the dogs, of course, and had other unintended consequences — but that’s another story.

WeaponsMan

Quiet Professionals, Noisy Machinery