Friday Tour d’Horizon, 2017 Week 04

As we all know from Junior High French, Tour d’Horizon means Hognose has too many stories in his open tabs at the end of the week. What do you expect? It’s Friday! Guns I don’t wanna work, I just wanna bang on my gun all day. For the Worst Sportsman in the Trap Club We give you a belt-fed, …

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The 5.56 Timeline is Dead! Long live the 5.56 Timeline!

Use the links on the left of the page to navigate through the many html pages of the Timeline, organized by year. One of the key resources for anyone interested in the long process of development of the small-caliber, high-velocity concept, leading up to the American adoption of the 5.56mm M16 and M16A1 rifles in …

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When Guns are Outlawed, Only Outlaws will have Gold

We’re fond of saying that you don’t need a gun… just about anything can kill somebody. Gold? Sure. If it’s molten gold, taken orally. Smithsonian Magazine: Centuries ago, having molten gold poured down your throat was actually the preferred means of death by molten metal. Marcus Lincinius Crassus, an astoundingly wealthy Roman general, is rumored to have died …

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Year of the Pistol-Caliber Carbine? Really?

We’re told that “2017 is The Year of the Pistol-Caliber Carbine” was one of the themes at SHOT this year. Online, it’s probably best developed by Michael Bane in this article. This was, as I predicted, the Year of the Pistol Caliber Carbine. They were all over the place on the SHOT floor, and I …

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When Guns are Outlawed, Only Outlaws will have Chili Powder

Holy pepper spray, Batman!  What happened to Welshman David Evans? That’s him, looking rather grimly squinty in the picture. The Daily Telegraph: “He instantly thought he had been blinded and didn’t know what he’d thrown at him, he was shaking in chock, hanging on to the counter being sick thinking he was going to go blind. …

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A Master Class on Influence Operations at CIA

There are basically three classes of personnel at CIA, and there are a few simple rules to understanding them: There is a tiny minority of no-fooling spymasters: operational intelligence officers in the Clandestine Service, who are responsible for 100% of the Agency’s agent recruiting and collection of HUMINT information; There is a larger number of technical brains: headquarters-bound …

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Sunday Slippage

This is the one Sunday post this week; call it the 9 AM post, or maybe the 10 AM post. That’s what it’s going to say; that’s our story and we’re sticking to it. But it’s actually going live about ten hours later. How come? Well, there’s a story in this Sunday slippage, but it’s not really …

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Some More SIG Updates: MPX, M17 (P320) Pistol

MPX Price …Going Up! Word at SHOT was that the MPX versions that are shipping — pistol, carbine, and SBR — are selling well, but that the company was planning to raise prices by $300 a unit, and to delete the accessories that used to come with one: QD sling, cleaning kit, etc. The backup iron sights are …

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Saturday Matinee 2016 03: SIX (Television, 2017)

You can almost see the pitch meeting as you watch the show… kind of like a scene from The Producers, but not funny: “Hey, let’s have a show about an Elite Super Ninja military special operations unit. Let’s hire a high-profile vet as a military advisor so we get all the details of uniforms and weapons right, …

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An Unwanted First for the Destroyer Okhotnik

Three Okhotnik-class Ships at Anchor, early 1900s. The ship was patrolling an anchorage in the Baltic Sea on 26 September, 1917. The Germans had been softening up the Russian forces in the area for what both sides expected would be an offensive against the Russian-occupied seacoast. German naval air forces, which had air superiority, conducted aerial bombing …

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