Category Archives: Don’t be THAT guy

If it quacks like Duck Creek Armory

Davenport, ~~Idaho~~ Iowa (d’oh! Thanks to Joe in the comments for the correction) gun dealer Duck Creek Armory is in the news, and not in a good way. Mike Colón at CBS4 has a report:

A Davenport online gun store has been given a grade of “F” by the Better Business Bureau.

The BBB says that it has more than 25 complaints against Duck Creek Armory for non-delivery of ordered products.

Some customers have been waiting for orders since last spring and are out from $800 to $1600 dollars. Phone calls and letters have not been answered.

The BBB web page has not been updated, but it does contain one horror story of a customer who, four months after paying, with no credible promise of delivery, cancelled his order — and was whacked with a 15% “restocking fee” for a gun Duck Creek Armory apparently never had in stock at any time. (They refunded the fee under pressure from BBB).

While the CBS4 story says it’s an “online store,” the company also maintained a storefront in a Davenport strip mall. The complaints seem to have been more from internet buyers, and from the complaints, the company seems to have had a habit of selling guns they didn’t exactly own at the time of the sale.

The company’s Facebook page is up, but they haven’t updated it since mid-October. Its “Reviews” are full of complaints from customers:

The www.duckcreekarmory.com website is down, showing the GoDaddy “Wanna buy this deadbeat domain?” page:

The firm has long had “a reputation” on the forums, but not a shockingly bad one. For example, one ARFCOM member wrote this summer that he had visited their physical store, and their ARs were parts frankensteins; he’d:

…been in their store a couple times but have not been overly impressed with their packages. Basically everything you see is something you could build out of a Brownell’s catalog for the same price. In an area dominated by bird and deer hunters who still rely on their trusty 12 gauge or grandpa’s 30-06, these rifles probably seem pretty attractive. Im sure there is a reason they have not branched out past gunbroker to the forums; we would peck them to death over mil spec issues in their guns.

Another thread savaged a Duck Creek tacticool build of a Saiga:

Big mag? Check. A large chunk of the TAPCO catalog? Check. Rails installed without regard to alignment? Check. But the winning accessory has to be the fake suppressor. On a shotgun. Bubba The Gunsmith was clearly in the house at Duck Creek Armory.

This thread showcases their distinctive billet AR lowers… (which Hajny has elsewhere said were made for DCA by Sun Devil) and the owner’s claim to have been a Ranger. As far as we know, that claim has not been checked.

Several Carolina Shooters members had mixed experiences, including one positive one: Duck creek Armory manager Joe Hajny making good a botched layaway (after the customer went public on the board). Offsetting that in the same thread are several cases of nondelivery of product. It seems to have been Duck Creek Armory practice to list guns as “in stock” that were not.

The firm currently has no listings on GunBroker.

One prescient lad noted on ARFCOM back in 2012, in reference to a since-aged-off Duck Creek Armory auction, “Breaks my rule of thumb: If the rules the seller sets on the auction take up more space than the description you don’t want to do business with them.”

That’s pretty good policy.

Others in the same thread noted that the rifle in question was misrepresented, which might have been ignorance rather than cupidity, but used furniture was represented as new, and “parts that actually served in Vietnam” were A2 parts made at least ten years after the departure of US ground troops from that tropical conflict.

We would urge consumers to exercise caution dealing with Duck Creek Armory of Davenport, IA (near the IL border), but the business may be imploding at enough of a rate to make that a moot point. They might not be headed for a quackup; they’re already there.

TAPCO-laden AKs and cheapest-parts ARs are not really our cup of tea, but they have a home in the marketplace and it’s always unfortunate when a dealer goes paws up. When the music of any business stops, some combination of customers, suppliers and creditors always winds up without a seat, and of course the owners and/or stockholders wind up zeroed out. We’ve been there, done that, and have a little sympathy for the businessman in question, but if he was making material misrepresentations of his product in GunBroker auctions, it was only a matter of time; we’re better off without him.

OK, tread on me.

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That’s the message from an unnamed command master chief to SEALs in the field:

DALLAS, November 4, 2013 – Former Navy Seal Carl Higbie claims a senior enlisted advisor has banned “Don’t Tread On Me” uniform patches for active-duty operators. Per Higbie’s Daily Caller column, an email circulated on October 22 advising personnel to wear only an American flag patch on their right shoulder. The correspondence was forwarded to him by multiple active SEALs.

“You are no longer authorized to wear the “Don’t Tread On Me” patch. Again the only patch authorized for wear is the American flag on the right shoulder. Please pass the word to all,” the email reportedly said. The Navy Jack is a very popular symbol among SEALs, Marines and Navy personnel, including but not limited to conservatives, constitutionalists and libertarians.

The flag features a rattlesnake and the words “Don’t Tread On Me,” against 13 red and white horizontal stripes. Continental marines carried the message into battle against the British for its symbolism of resistance. Since 2002, all U.S. Navy ships began flying the First Navy Jack in place of the Union Jack for “the duration of the global war on terrorism”.

Higbie warns this move highlights the growing breach between lower ranks and “yes-men” of the top brass which threatens military cohesion. He believes the Obama administration is waging war on the Navy’s heritage in pursuit of political correctness, and complicit leaders embrace this agenda for career health.

“Why would our leaders sell out our heritage? Why would they rob present and future sailors of our battle cry? When a friend of mine asked his leadership the same question, he was told, “The Jack is too closely associated with radical groups. We must assume that this thought policeman embedded in the SEAL community is speaking of the Tea Party, whose flag (which also dates from the American Revolution) depicts a snake with the same defiant slogan as The Navy Jack.”

The “Don’t Tread on Me” phrase is also present on the bright yellow Gadsden flag, which is used by the Tea Party, constitutionalists, civil libertarians and limited-government proponents.

via ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ patches allegedly banned from Navy SEAL uniforms | Washington Times Communities.

Some people are seeing this as a political message. We’re inclined to think otherwise. When dealing with an E9 of any service, sometimes picayune adherence to uniform regulations is mere picayune adherence to uniform regs. That’s the side of the bet the house has its money on.

Also, until our Plan To Save The Army™ by requiring all sergeants major to have at least an average IQ is implemented, remember that when we say half of all senior enlisted advisors are below average, we could be talking relative to the whole damn world. When a senior NCO does something that seems inexplicably stupid, sometimes a brief conversation with the NCO in question is all it takes to move that action into the explicably stupid category.

Oswald did it, you know.

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Lee Harvey Oswald murdered President John F. Kennedy 50 years ago today. Unlike almost any other possible character, he had the means, motive and opportunity. The longstanding conspiracy theories are bunk. I don’t know how many people have claimed the shot was “impossible.” Really? We could do it. You could do it. Range under 100m, scoped (if second-rate) rifle, slow-moving but steadily-moving target. Piece of cake. The difference is, of course, you wouldn’t do it. And we wouldn’t do it. Because we’re not bat guano crazy Communists like Lee Oswald, a guy who was so pro-Soviet he went there to stay, and so pro-Fidelista he tried to go there — and they wouldn’t have him. (We covered some of that last month).

Nonetheless, conspiracy theories thrive. On the 50th anniversary of the murder, one of the first events we personally remember, comes the New York Times and Washington Post to suggest… right-wingers did it. Or enabled it. Or something. Yeah, suuure. David Bernstein at the Voloky Conspiracy lawblog (“Conspiracy,” for the mouth-breathers still obsessed by the JFK whacking, is a cute name for a group blog of libertarian-minded law professors, not a description of what they do there) commits the necessary but futile attempt to straighten out the twenty-something ahistorical lightweights on the papers’ staffs:

This is really amazing to me. The New York Times and the Washington Post each manages to publish a piece on the Kennedy assassination, by two different authors, focusing on what they see as the right-wing extremist environment in Dallas in 1963, and while never saying so directly, implicitly blaming Kennedy’s assassination on that environment.

Look, guys. Lee Harvey Oswald murdered JFK. Oswald was a Communist. Not a small c, “all we are saying is give peace a chance and let’s support Negro civil rights” kind of Communist, but someone so committed to the cause (and so blind to the nature of the USSR) that he actually went to live in the Soviet Union. And when that didn’t work out, Oswald became a great admirer of Castro. He apparently would have gone to live in Cuba before the assassination if the Cubans would have had him. Before assassinating Kennedy, Oswald tried to kill a retired right-wing general. As near as we can tell, he targeted Kennedy in revenge for Kennedy’s anti-Castro actions.

via Remarkable Take on JFK’s Assassination | The Volokh ConspiracyThe Volokh Conspiracy.

The similar tropes in the two articles may be coincidence, or they may be another example of how the left-leaning press tends to work together to coordinate stories and themes. (Remember when all at once the most serious problem in the world was some golf club that didn’t admit women?) Most likely, the “conspiracy” behind the two pieces involved the publicists for the latest conspiracy book, Dallas 1963 by Minutaglio and Davis — the Post article is written by Minutaglio, who argues that the Tea Party, the universal bogeyman of Post readers, did it. This book blames, we are not making this up (although Minutaglio and Davis certainly are), the “climate of hate in Dallas.” The “hate” included a radio program that demeaned and abused Kennedy supporters as — wait for it, it’s really raw and vile — “the mistaken.” O the humanity! Bernstein doesn’t mention the book, so he may not know of it. It’s best described (based on a short examination at a bookstore) as the usual conspiracy drivel, with a buy-it-today slant. Minutaglio and Davis even identify right-wing retired general Edwin Walker, another target of Oswald, as one of the conspirators. But the Times and Post bought their message.

From there, it’s just a short step to ID the real killer: George W. Bush.

Bernstein refers readers to a former professor of his, Brandeis’s Jacob Cohen, who has a timely piece in the upcoming Commentary which is already online. This is absolutely a Read The Whole Thing™ for those of us who are not conspiracy buffs. (The sad fact is, the conspiracy buffs are not educable, for reasons Cohen covers in his class, “The Idea of Conspiracy in American Culture.”) Cohen on Oswald’s weapon:

Here’s another for the perception-is-reality file. Shortly after the assassination, a Dallas policeman identified the rifle found on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, where eyewitnesses had placed a gunman, as a German Mauser. The rifle was actually the one Oswald probably ordered from Klein’s mail-order service in Chicago. It was the one ballistics tests showed had fired all the bullets, or testable portions of bullets, which were recovered. It was an Italian made Mannlicher-Carcano. It was not a Mauser. But why, Corsi fulminates, did the commission ignore the identification of a second gun, or refuse to consider the possibility that the actual murder weapon was the Mauser? After all, someone said it was a Mauser! (The Mauser has never been produced, by the way.)

The images you’re about to see are all from world.guns.ru for consistency. The first one’s similar to Oswald’s but a 1938 7.35mm version. We’ll see Oswald’s in a moment. But our point is, the readers of this blog would never mistake a Mannlicher-Carcano…:

For a Mauser:

Not even this Mauser (a “Commission” Gew.88), which looks a lot like a Mannlicher because it uses a Mannlicher feed system, but uses some Mauser features and was generally called by Americans in 1963 a “Mauser”:

For the record, here is Oswald’s gun, in a photo taken in Washington during the 1970s. So the conspiracy theorists will say we went and swapped guns, we suppose. (Sigh).

We’d have used the Warren Commission shot, but the versions we could find are grainy. If there is one artifact in DC that has a good chain of custody, though, this one’s probably it.

But our point is, not everybody’s deeply-enough immersed in the gun culture to see the differences. What are the odds that a Texas cop fifty years ago would misidentify one foreign bolt-action for another? He probably knew US weapons (he was very likely a military veteran, as there had been a nonstop draft since 1940). But he was likely to be familiar with his service revolver, his .22, and the gun he took deer hunting, which was probably a lever-action.

There is a lot of drivel written about the Mannlicher-Carcano, and the conspiracy theorists suggest that the shot was “impossible” with that gun. Most of them, of course, are not shooters. A lot of it seems to be ethnocentric nonsense that has, at its fundament, the concept that Italians are stupid and cowardly and couldn’t or wouldn’t make a serviceable firearm. This would be news to the LRDG and SAS, who liked certain Italian heavy machine guns.

The Mannlicher-Carcano is not the best battle rifle of World War II (that would be the M1), or even of World War I, for it’s not the equal of the Mauser, but it’s equivalent to the more-respected Mosin-Nagant or Lee-Enfield. When adopted in 1891, it had adequate range, accuracy and firepower for an infantry rifle of the day, as defined not just by the Italian Army but by most of the world’s armies. In fact, it had a number of advantages over the gun the US had not yet adopted (Krag-Jorgensen), let alone the Springfield Trapdoors American soldiers were still toting when the Carcanos started coming off the line.

The Italian Army ordnance department was staffed by officers who wanted, mirabile dictu, to arm their forces with good weapons. Sometimes they succeeded, sometimes not, but the differences between the Eurasian bolt-action rifles of the 20th Century are, when they are considered as military weapons, on the margins.

Referring to an overheated conspiracy book by Jerome Corsi (another example of a Harvard PhD indicating less than some might think), Cohen talks ballistics:

The ingenuity of nearly all the conspiracies Corsi rehearses and endorses is similarly breathtaking. Asked for a favorite, I would vote for his explanation for how a bullet that ballistics established was fired from Oswald’s Italian gun—Commission Exhibit 399—found its way to a stretcher in the basement of the Parkland Hospital where Kennedy and the wounded Texas Governor John Connally were taken immediately after the shooting. CE-399 is the sine qua non of the Warren Commission’s thesis that one bullet hit Kennedy first and then Connally, causing some of the damage to Kennedy and all of Connally’s five wounds. The last of those was a shallow flesh wound in his upper thigh. For the thesis to be true, the bullet had to be capable of having broken one of Connally’s ribs, and his wrist, en route to his leg. Every knowledgeable person on all sides of the debate agrees.

Corsi describes the bullet as “pristine,” and also as “almost pristine.” He goes back and forth from one formulation to the other. In either case he stipulates that CE-399 is incapable, given its shape, weight, and metallic content, of breaking Connally’s broken bones and of leaving the lead elements that were extracted from his wrist and chest. I have dealt with and I think resolved this issue twice in articles in Commentary over the years⁴, so I will not rehearse that demonstration here except to speak of the nature of the would-be conspiracy involving it. Conspiracists believe it had to be placed at Parkland that day to be used as a piece of evidence to support the single-assassin theory—which would not even be formulated for another two months. The bullet was found in the basement of the hospital under Connally’s stretcher. At the time, Connally was upstairs. Kennedy, who was dead at this point, and his stretcher were also upstairs. A neutron-activation analysis of the bullet and the lead extracted from Connally’s wrist, reported by Dr. Vincent Guinn in 1978, established that the lead extracted from Connally almost certainly came specifically from CE-399. Simple logic suggests the bullet fell from Connally’s thigh when he was lying on the stretcher.

“But,” Cohen goes on to note, “simple logic is not in play here.” Indeed. It is remarkable, and amazes us as much as it does Cohen, that conspiracy-minded persons, like Corsi, are capable of protean feats of idea-shifting; as one wacky conspiratorial idea is debunked they latch onto another, without regard for the degree to which it contradicts the idea they held in an anaconda grip mere moments ago. Continue to question the illogic, screwy weighting of facts, and persistence in “facts” that are not any such thing, and the conspiracy theorist soon comes to identify you as one of them – part of the conspiracy yourself!

Welcome. We’ll show you the secret handshake later.

Cohen concludes that conspiracy buffs will always be with us — as will, of course, authors that cash in on them. Bernstein, for his part, concludes by asking conspiracy theorists to keep out of the comments. As you might expect, they fail to heed his request.

After all, Bernstein and Cohen… must be part of the conspiracy. Hey, those are both names that could be Jewish (which we hardly ever see among scholars from Brandeis, right?)…. has anyone blamed the… ?

In a world of compromises, some put their cartridges in backwards

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We’ve all seen this picture from an inept (but Croesus-rich) marketing department’s catalog shot: the ultimate example of a bozo’s attempt to “pass” in the gun culture. (If you haven’t we explain its origin in our post on the Larry Correia “HK: Because you suck, and we hate you” meme).

The backwards rounds have become a pretty standard internet gag when taking HK pictures, since the factory shipped a catalog without QC’ing it.

As much as we like to make fun of the Gnomes of Oberndorf and their adoring Bund of American wannabes, we would never think that anything printed by H&K or HKUSA would be used as instructional material by criminals.

But the East Baton Rouge, LA, Police would beg to differ. They recently relieved a criminal of an auto pistol in this selfsame condition. (Hat tip to Bob Owens at BearingArms.com, who also likes to call these super geniuses of crime “rocket surgeons.”) But maybe the guy’s not a sped. Maybe he’s an HK Fanboy, just having to make do with a lesser pistol until he steals the (backwards-loaded) USP of his dreams?

Or maybe the HK catalog guy got fired and after years of struggle in the Great Recession had to turn to crime, but still hadn’t learned how to load a magazine?

Naaah. Probably not. But the similarity is striking, no? Marketing drones and criminals probably have more than a few similarities, but they’re all mere coincidences… right?

About Spree / Rampage Killers

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We may be mixing two criminological concepts in that headline, but we’re talking about the lepers who go into a Victim Disarmament Zone and start shooting. So we wanted to call your attention to an important article in the Wall Street Journal weekend edition. It’s on Page C1 (first page of the Review section) if you have the hard copy of the paper. It’s illustrated by a brilliantly symbolic graphic by Daniel Bejar, showing a youth with a rifle in a spotlight. If you haven’t got that paper, we’ll get you some links at the end of our comments.

One of the most interesting features of Schulman’s article is that guns scarcely figure into his analysis at all. He tosses out a single anti-gun shibboleth, but it’s clear that he sees the problem as one of human behavior, not one caused by inanimate objects. And he suggests a practical method of preventing that behavior — the first one we have seen, and one we were already using instinctively.

He reviews a lot of literature and finds that killers, like the mass shooters that bedevil us from time to time, are not “insane” as that’s clinically defined: they don’t generally hear voices, hallucinate, or act in illogical fashion (once you grasp their ends, which are illogical to the rest of us). Instead, they are personality-disordered, but quite logical and even methodical in their actions. This has several consequences (which we understand not just from Schulman’s excellent article, but also from previous study of personality disordered individuals) that include:

They do act rationally. (As many have noted, rampage shooters shoot up VDZs, not biker bars. This alone shows they are solidly grounded in reality, however “disturbed” they may be).
Personality disorders do not interfere globally with normal activities of daily life. People close to the perp may detect something “off” about him and even fear him, but others may see nothing amiss.
There is zero probability of one of these people being detected in any typical mental health screening as of 2013′s state of medical science. Intensive one-on-one examined by trained professionals, maybe.
Personality disorders are hard to screen for, and common. Most personality-disordered individuals are out there in society. (And most of them will never kill anybody). You can’t even recognize the livestock, let alone sort the sheep from the goats.
There is zero probability of any kind of practical background check system detecting them in advance. In fact, despite the lies of some politicians (like Mike Bloomberg and Terry McAuliffe), killers of this type can usually pass not only the existent background checks, but any imaginable one. The Virginia Tech killer, the Aurora theater killer, and the Navy Yard shooter all passed background checks, some of them extensive ones. The Newtown killer killed his mother, who had passed the background checks. Note that four of the top five mass shooters are not American; one was a cop and used issue weapons. Our previous reporting on this here: (6 from 5: What can we learn from gun massacres, Dec. 2012).
The first awareness officialdom gets that Johnny is not right is when they get the 911 call. Bottom line, these events cannot be anticipated.

But there may be a mechanism for prevention, if one understands these gnomes. Their goal is to appall and terrorize, and to make society aware of their alienation. So to them, the sensationalistic media that will dwell on their crime, and, perversely, celebrate their lives, is a vital ally (as it is for terrorists).

One thing that Schulman scarcely mentions is guns, although he’d have lost his status as an urban Jewish liberal if he hadn’t thrown in a line about “high-capacity magazines designed more for offense”. And if you look at the killers and what they’re thinking and doing, guns seem orthogonal to the problem and to any solution.

The key take-away from Schulman’s article is an eight-point guide to journalistic conduct with respect to mass killings.

Never publish a shooter’s propaganda.
Hide their names and faces.
Don’t report on biography or speculate on motive.
Minimize specifics and gory details.
No photos or videos of the event.
Talk about the victims, but minimize images of grieving families.
Decrease the saturation.
Tell a different story.

This is, in fact, the exact opposite of what the media usually does. Think of Rolling Stone’s unabashed fandom of the Boston Marathon bomber, or the way the cable news stringers try to provoke weeping and wailing from bereaved families, and the way the networks offer up their audiences as receptors for killers’ grievances. (Anyone remember NBC’s shameless promotion of the Viginia Tech murderer’s photos and manifesto? Ratings, baby…).

We have extremely low opinions of the patriotism, integrity and character of reporters and editors as a class. We formed thes opinions during long years of observing their reporting from the dual viewpoints of consumer and ~~victim~~ subject. To follow Schulman’s eight points would cost newsmen nothing, and would potentially produce a significant societal benefit — not immediately, because they have to be implemented during the reactive-reporting stage, but in the long run. But newsmen won’t do it — there’s too much voyeurism and potential for self-promotion in these crimes for them to give more than lip service for them to curtail acting as killers’ publicists.

The idea’s been suggested before, by us among others. We generally try to avoid mentioning the names of these gnomes. It’s what the next gnome does it for, and we knew it instinctively even before reading Schulman’s review of the literature. But his analysis is worth reading, as is his expansion of the eight points, go hither and Read The Whole Thing™.

Direct link (including a video of an interview with Schulman).
The Video Interview (didn’t load for us, perhaps you’ll have better luck).
Go through Google if the Journal paywalls it off.
PDF page 1 and PDF page 2.

UPDATE 1200R 14 Mar 13:

This posr has been edited to correct the link to PDF Page 1. Thanks to staghounds in the comments. (Update to the update: several other commenters also caught the error, thanks to all — one even provided the correct URL).

Timeline: the FBI weapons theft in Andover, MA

The law is a what, Dickens said?

The $20k reward is going to be paid, rumor has it, to the boy’s father. From Junior’s point of view, it probably looks a lot like thirty pieces of silver. (“Thanks Dad!”) On the other hand, if your kid is a criminal, you might as well make sure crime pays — for you. And this is one way to make sure that the thieving little runt doesn’t move back in when his sentence is up — if Massachusetts even sentences him to incarceration, which is unlikely. After all, he’s been burgling, stealing, and getting busted for it, for at least three years already, and they haven’t locked him up yet.

Massachusetts, which passes a few new laws aimed at the dwindling population of legal gun-owners every time it gets alarmed that some other state was cited as the most irrationally anti-gun jurisdiction, actually has a law criminalizing, as a very serious (10-year) felony, what the FBI Agent did. It turns out the state takes a dim view of “wantonly and recklessly” (their words) leaving the guns in the car where a child (albeit a child burglar) can get at them. Here’s the black letter law (irrelevant sections deleted):

Section 131L. (a) It shall be unlawful to store or keep any firearm, rifle or shotgun including, but not limited to, large capacity weapons, or machine gun in any place unless such weapon is secured in a locked container or equipped with a tamper-resistant mechanical lock or other safety device, properly engaged so as to render such weapon inoperable by any person other than the owner or other lawfully authorized user. For purposes of this section, such weapon shall not be deemed stored or kept if carried by or under the control of the owner or other lawfully authorized user.

(d) A violation of this section shall be punished, in the case of a rifle or shotgun that is a large capacity weapon, firearm or machine gun was stored or kept in a place where a person under the age of 18 may have access, without committing an unforeseeable trespass, by a fine of not less than $5,000 nor more than $10,000 or by imprisonment for not less than two and one-half years, nor more than ten years, or by both such fine and imprisonment.

(e) A violation of the provisions of this section shall be evidence of wanton or reckless conduct in any criminal or civil proceeding if a person under the age of 18 who was not a trespasser or was a foreseeable trespasser acquired access to a weapon, unless such person possessed a valid firearm identification card issued under section 129B and was permitted by law to possess such weapon, and such access results in the personal injury to or the death of any person.

However, even though this law is invoked routinely against ~~plebes~~ ~~serfs~~ ~~minions~~ commoners, the People’s Republic of Massachusetts does not customarily prosecute police and Federal agents for criminal activity, due to their ~~Patents of Nobility~~ badges. There is no exception in the law for these officials, but the laws in Massachusetts are administered, much like the law in Jim Crow states, according to an unwritten set of policies that apply the laws according to the station and caste of the violator.

Sources:

Boston Globe story (caution, autoplay crap video with a loud crap ad before it, which was in our case for Barska’s third-world-sweatshop crap riflescopes. Barska: lousy, low-quality products, unethical and shoddy manufacture, and unethical and shoddy advertising — doesn’t it just make you wanna buy three of them?)
Boston Herald story
LE insiders
The Massachusetts General Laws. (Do they know George III lost?)
The Gun Owners’ Action League of Massachusetts (mostly, doomed apparatchiks who exclaim, “if only Stalin knew!” … but that’s what you get in a People’s Republic. They’re trying. But you probably don’t want them to move to your state because they’ll vote in anti-gun Democrats like they did at home).

When a Bozo from NBC met the Solid Concepts 1911

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Solid Concepts made clear, and we hope we did last Thursday, that their Direct Metal Laser Sintered 1911 was not a production item, but a technology demonstrator, a proof-of-concept for the prototyping-fu that Solid has mastered.

Some thermometer-IQ rocket surgeon from NBC News, one Devin Coldewey, didn’t get the point, interviewed a Solid Concepts exec who belabored the point, and pushed a story through NBC’s “layers and layers of editors” and up on their website with a title showing he still doesn’t get the point: “Want a 3-D printed metal gun? All you need is a million bucks.” Here’s a taste of the 440-mains-voltage stupid embedded within:

[P]erhaps the most important piece of the story has been left out of the headlines: the gun was made with highly advanced and extremely expensive industrial-level machinery.

Gee, look at what we said about this thing (along with several grafs explaining the technology, which you’re not going to get from the English majors at NBC News). Boy howdy.

Solid Concepts has a manufacturing FFL but doesn’t intend to join the glutted market for 1911s-with-a-twist. Their remarkable gun is meant to showcase the technology they have mastered and its ability to form fully usable, durable prototype parts. While the firearms industry is an obvious customer, DMLS is already widely used in aerospace and other high-end manufactures.

Let’s look at the numbers, shall we, since Coldewey is claiming “a million bucks,” like some nightmare hybrid of Ron Burgundy and Dr.Evil. (Incidentally, a million, or 3/4 of one, which Coldewey treats as the same thing, is not a high price for any kind of industrial machinery… anyone can figure out how to do the NPV and break-even calculations that tell you whether it’s a price that works for you). Coldewey again:

For one thing, “the equipment we have is about $750,000 for purchase,” explained [Scott] McGowan[, Solid Concepts VP]. “They can go for a million.”

Even if you had the money, you’d need an industrial warehouse capable of powering the machine, which uses a high-precision laser to solidify powdered metals in a pattern determined by a 3-D computer model.

These rapid prototyping setups are often used by companies that want to perfect a design before manufacturing it overseas. They’re very different from the sub-$2,000 desktop 3-D printers you can buy today, which lay down melted plastic in layers instead and were used to create the Liberator, the world’s first working printed handgun.

You’d also need some special inert gases to fill the production chamber with, a skilled metalworker and gunsmith to finish the parts (“you haven’t seen the pieces when they come out of the machine,” said McGowan), and of course a federal firearm production license.

An EOSint M280 DMLS machine — about $800k installed.

Now, there’s no requirement that someone display basic grade-school numeracy to receive a journalism degree, and Coldewey’s clearly someone who can be grateful no such gate exists.

He never says, except in the headline produced by those “layers of editors,” that the gun cost a million to produce, and clearly, it didn’t: Coldewey and NBC pulled that number out of that place where only the Deming, NM police would go.

First, nobody buys a prototyping machine to make guns in production, something that Coldewey did figure out, after Scott McGowan beat it into his thick skull. But Second, nobody uses any industrial machine to make one of anything. What you do, if you want a prototype, is bring your design to a firm like Solid Concepts, who will run it for you. You don’t need the machine, you need maybe 24-48 hours of aggregate machine run time.

Coldewey could have explained it. He could have estimated Solid Concepts’ cost to manufacture their POC .45 (Solid themselves seem unwilling to state a number, and it’s possible although unlikely that they don’t have cost accounting data that lets them do it). Given that he’s apparently as innumerate as a neolithic savage, he could have gotten a second- or third-grader to do it. (If he’s really desperate and can’t find one, there’s a lot of out-of-work MBAs).

Or he could just make up a million-dollar number and run with it.

But really, no reputable newsman would do that. Right?

How the Administration plans to celebrate Veterans’ Day

Allegedly antisemitic, arguably anti-American, rangey and cadaverous of appearance and impractical and doctrinaire of thought, foreign-born Samantha Power was always a … curious … choice for UN Ambassador. But she is probably a pretty good marker for how the Administration feels about its combat veterans: in general, it prefers those who betrayed them. Power’s Vets’ day message for you: “There is no greater embodiment of being outspoken on behalf of what you believe in — and being ‘all in’ in every way — than Jane Fonda.”

New U.S. ambassador to the UN Samantha Power didn’t waste her diplomatic skills on Vietnam veterans at a New York speech, praising actress Jane Fonda for “being outspoken on behalf” of her convictions.

Power, 43, was speaking at the United Nations Association of the USA 2013 Global Leadership Awards in New York Wednesday.

“Hi everybody,” Power said, according to a transcript. “You know life has changed when you’re hanging out with Jane Fonda backstage. There is no greater embodiment of being outspoken on behalf of what you believe in — and being ‘all in’ in every way — than Jane Fonda. And it’s a huge honor just to even briefly have shared the stage with her.”

via America’s top UN diplomat has high praise for ‘Hanoi Jane’ | Fox News.

One wonders which of Fonda’s reported actions Power finds worthy of such “huge honor.” Was it crewing-up on a 57mm AA gun? You did recognize the setting of the photo above, yes? Here’s another from the same shoot (without resorting to the most common one):

Haranguing POWs on propaganda audio tapes she made for their captors? Haranguing them in person? Informing on them? Precipitating their torture? (She admits all but the last, but still condemns veterans for criticizing her).

Of course, Sam Power is not the only Administration figure who likes Jane Fonda, but dislikes combat veterans (at least, American ones). There’s this knucklehead:

So what does 70-something-and-wrinkly Hanoi Jane say now? She says vets need to “get a life” and forget about her betrayal. A bit too late for the ones who didn’t survive her buddies, the people who shot them down or the ones who, with her moral and possibly actual, physical, support, tortured them to death. They can’t get a life because they no longer had a life. Thanks, Jane. Thanks, Sam.

So remember that Hanoi interlude, the formative event in the Legend of Jane Fonda. That’s what Sam Power is celebrating; that’s the only A-Level public episode of Fonda’s long and parasitic trustafarian life. Well, some vet already drafted a suitable reply:

Table for two. Sharia Sam Power is joining her.

Seen on a milk carton: two FBI guns

Special Agents from every other Federal Agency are snickering today, as the FBI has had to resort to a lot of begging (and a $20,000 reward, but mostly, begging) for clues about the whereabouts of two Bureau weapons pictured here (these are actually similar weapons that the FBI hadn’t yet misplaced, as of press time).

The two guns are an M16A1 updated to quasi-M4 carbine (which is a pretty typical FBI carbine), and a McMillan-stocked 7.62mm sniper rifle (again, a very typical Bureau weapon). The M16 has a carbine barrel and gas system, an EoTech sight, and a backup sight set to co-witness with the EoTech. It also has a Streamlight TL-1.

The Boston Herald has two separate stories on where the guns vanished from (on the same page!). One, a print story, quotes a Bureau official as saying that the guns were lifted from a SWAT vehicle that responded to a callout in Andover, Massachusetts. The video at the same link, from a Boston TV news report, suggests that they were stolen from the g-ride of a special agent who lives in Andover.

The FBI has an exemplary record on firearms accountability, and this sort of thing has never happened before.

Well, except for when two FBI guns like these were stolen, along with night-vision gear and body armor, from an agent’s car. That was very long ago — August of this year, in Charlotte, NC. The weapons were once again an M16A1 with Streamlight and EoTech, and a Remington 870 with pistol grip and extended magazine. (The stolen M16 also had a vertical foregrip).

And except for 2007, when some 449 weapons were lost or stolen from FBI custody, one of which was stolen from an agent’s car and then used in a Detroit homicide, and recovered at a crime scene.

But hey, that one was recovered. The Bureau will get it back… when the homicide case is concluded, if Detroit doesn’t lose it or destroy it with the tons of crime guns they stumble across annually up there.

If you’re in a position to snitch out the location of the Charlotte guns, that’s worth $5k to the red-faced G-men.

We don’t have the memo yet, but if you have the location of the Massachusetts guns, that morsel of information is worth $20k to the FBI. Apparently they take loss of a sniper rifle more seriously than an automatic weapon. (Maybe the Secret Service is threatening to bill them for the overtime their protective details pull).

UPDATE:

The FBI has recovered the guns that were stolen in Andover, in the nearby city of Lawrence. That was quick; our congratulations to the agents involved. (To explain the cities’ relationship: Andover is the sort of place an FBI agent might live. Lawrence is the sort of place he might serve search warrants, if he’s on the gang squad). As far as we know, the Charlotte guns, and over 300 of the 449 guns from 2007, are still out there somewhere.

Exit thought

We don’t leave guns in cars, even though our cars reside in locked garages. We have 100% accountability of firearms. Could these facts be connected? Far be it from us to make suggestions to the FBI, who’ve been bagging criminals on a wholesale basis since Hoover (J. Edgar or Herbert, take your pick), but it does seem that they, and some other federal agencies (cough hack ATF cough), might apply a little humility and common sense to firearms storage.

Update II

Here’s a DOJ IG 2007 report on FBI weapons accountability… key take-aways:

They’re not losing the weapons as rapidly as they did in 2002. Yay, Bureau.
The FBI’s got a big issue with laptops, and doesn’t try to keep track of which ones have classified or sensitive information on them.
Nobody even expects them to try hard, which might be why they don’t: “We recognize that in an organization the size of the FBI, some weapons and laptops will inevitably be stolen or go missing. “
On some weapons, not only the gun was missing, but the required FD-500 form to report its loss was, too.
When a weapon goes, it’s usually gone for good: during the course of a two-year IG investigation, 160 weapons went missing and only 7 of them were recovered.

Don’t you hate it when the law gets up your….

If you have just been pulled over for a moving violation, and you think you just saw a cop checking out your buns, you might just be right.

And if your natural reaction to that is stark staring terror, we’re not going to call you paranoid. Well, we might, but we bet David Eckert won’t. Here’s his story:

[Dangerous criminal Eckert, nabbed for a rolling-stop at a stop sign] appeared to be clenching his buttocks. Law enforcement thought that was probable cause to suspect that Eckert was hiding narcotics in his anal cavity. While officers detained Eckert, they secured a search warrant from a judge that allowed for an anal cavity search.

The lawsuit claims that Deming [New Mexico] Police tried taking Eckert to an emergency room in Deming, but a doctor there refused to perform the anal cavity search citing it was “unethical.”

But physicians at the Gila Regional Medical Center in Silver City agreed to perform the procedure and a few hours later, Eckert was admitted.

via 4 On Your Side investigates traffic stop nightmare | KOB.com.

This change of colon-examination venue may have legal consequences. The butt warrant was only good in one county, and it was invalid in the county where Gila Regional was. So the doctors and nurses who particpated there are exposed to potential liability — they went from being all up in Eckert’s nether reaches, to having a bunch of lawyers all up in theirs.

And “all up in” is not an exaggeration. In order, the Gila monsters:

X-rayed Eckert’s abdominal area.
Put on the blue glove. And gave him the finger wave.
New set of gloves, new round of finger waves.
In again, with the enema tube, as a throng of docs and cops kibitzed.
As with the first finger wave, the first enema didn’t work, so they did it again.
Brace yourseld! Here comes enema Number Three.
With the enemas not working, they tried X-Rays again.
Then they put him under and did a colonoscopy. If you’ve ever had a colonoscopy, you’ve had to sign a mountain of waivers and disclaimers. Not Eckert: these barbers just did it without his permission (or a valid warrant).

Even if the warrant had been valid in the county where all this police interest in David Eckert’s fundamental orifice found expression, numbers six through eight or so took place after the expiration time listed on the warrant.

Asked about the incident, Deming Police Chief Brandon Gigante (any relation to this guy?) clammed up and lawyered up.

But hey, they found the drugs, and got a dangerous criminal off the street… right? Well, not exactly. Turns out, there never were any drugs, just a guy with a clenched butt. But if there had been any drugs up this guy’s wazoo, this eight-step collaboration between some cops and doctors who shared a prurient interest in one man’s rectum totally would have found them.

Now what? Well, for the foreseeable future, everybody’s going to be clenching their butts when they meet Deming police. This won’t be an act of planned civil disobedience, or disrespect for the law. It’s going to be simple fear. And at least two doctors are going to be clenching the same anatomical feature in the same way as they come under professional-ethics scrutiny.

WeaponsMan

Quiet Professionals, Noisy Machinery