Guns

• A bizarre scandal is weighing anchor and setting sail in the Navy. Basic facts: high-ranking intelligence officers in charge of special-access programs (SAPs) arranged to buy suppressors from one of the officers’ brothers, a hot-rod mechanic in California. One of the officials, Lee Hall, is now indicted. (SAPs are very tightly-held classified projects, programs or operations. They have a history of doing amazing things; they also have a history of being exploited by dishonest individuals). And there appear to have been kickbacks all round.

• Here’s a Mauser with periscope, now in the collection of the Guardia Civil of Spain. Miguel tags it as a WWI gun, but it looks like a Spanish Mauser to us. Lots of these kinds of guns were used in WWI, and the Springfield Armory Museum has a few examples which also let the gunner operate the bolt and trigger from under cover. It looks awkward as all hell. This one looks like the hanging string might have operated a bellcrank or something to fire the trigger, at least, so perhaps it’s not complete. In any event, the Sopanish Civil War had its share of sieges and trench warfare.

• Gift for the man who has everything? He probably doesn’t have a 12″ barreled Saiga shotgun with a suppressor. From Cadiz Gun Works. Blackwater alumni (from before the idea of “let’s drop the standards to meet the available volunteers” that killed the company) may remember Tom and Vicki Jo Cole and Cole Gun Works. Their company, now in Ohio under a new name, continues to specialize in the Saiga, including radical customs like an 8″ AOW version and this beautifully nasty piece of work.  (Yeah, the picture embiggens).

Unconventional Warfare & Terrorism

• Looks like the fix is in for the FBI agent that blew away one of Speedbump’s Chechen-immigrant pals. The bureau is leaking that their guy has been exonerated by the usual whitewash. The fatal shot was to the back of the suspect’s head, in a second group of four, with all the shots beginning after the recorder a Mass. State Police officer was using was turned off.  The agent’s story, put on a polished 302 much later, was that the guy was attacking him on his hands and knees after eating the first four rounds, so he needed four more. Given the suspect’s history (he was a notably violent boxer, and had just implicated himself in a multiple homicide other than the Marathon bombing), the official story is certainly possible.

Update: Here is the letter exonerating the FBI agent by State Attorney Jeffery Ashton. Here’s the background with redacted statements by the officers. The death scene sketch is posted below. Note the Sword (a martial arts sword which was moved by one of the officers to be out of Todashev’s reach at the very outset of the interview) and the Pole (with which Todashev reportedly charged the officers).

• The Army continues to flail on adoption of a working camouflage pattern, instead keeping the troops in the day-glo ACUs. Apparently the sticking problem with Crye MultiCam (currently in use as OCP) is that Crye wants to be paid a licensing fee, and the Army would rather not pay the $24.8 million. (Bear in mind, the useless UCP on the ACU, and the interim replacement of it in the combat theater as OCP, have together cost the Army about $12 Billion. 

• Line dogs in the CIA, and overseers in Congress, are less than thrilled about the CIA’s “imvestigation” of the Benghazi disaster, which, depending on who you ask, is a slow-walk, a whitewash, or no investigation at all. (The CIA IG definitely conducted no investigation, although their reasons for not doing so have not been well articulated).

• Turkey, still the Sick Man of Europe centuries later, is conducting sham local “elections” in a week or so, which are designed to produce a landslide for Erdogan’s Al-Q-lite Islamist party. Keeping a promise to his supporters, he shut down Twitter across Turkey last Friday. Erdogan is angry at the internet platform because users have been Tweeting links to audio recordings of Erdogan and his son discussing laundering bribe money.  So why is this creep our ally? Basically, because they’ve built such a platform of Islamic hate in their country that whatever replaces him has strong odds of being worse.

• Now that Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is repealed, all is proceeding as we have foreseen. Next step? Lesbians who now want to be men think the Army should indulge them. Sure, why not, it gives a whole new meaning to doing the Duffle Bag Drag. Still, we think we are Napoleon, why don’t we get indulged like that?

• We’ve discussed the hazards of ancient UXO before. With the 100th anniversary of the Great War coming up, 2 Belgian workers have been killed and 2 wounded by UXO in Ypres, one of those resonant place names from that period. Belgian EOD renders hundreds, sometimes more than 1000, WWI projectiles and weapons safe every year, but they didn’t find this one, construction workers apparently did.

Tales of the Po-Po

One hopes we’ll find some good to put in here, but unfortunately decent and upright cops bagging bad guys whilst upholding the constitution are an everyday reality, not “news.” Please bear that in mind as you read the following tales which tend to the “Cops behaving badly” trend.

• A Border Patrol agent kidnapped, restrained, and raped three illegal-alien women. Two of them got away and told local authorities; as the cops closed in this embarrassment to the CBP capped himself in his home and improvised dungeon in Mission, TX. The cops freed the third woman, alive, thank God.

• Here’s a story with a happy ending, except for a fugitive murderer who stayed on the run for almost 40 years. Did you know the US Marshals Service has deployed facial recognition technology? Neither did Bruce Walter Keith, whose real name is James Robert Jones and who escaped from the US Disciplinary Barracks at Leavenworth, where he was serving a court-martial sentence for a 1974 murder. Funny: if he’d just done his time, he’d have been out by 1997 or so.

• A Sheriff’s deputy canned by King County, Washington last summer for stealing drugs out of evidence, has been busted again for going completely over to the far side: he had tried to remake himself as a master dealer, or drug kingpin. His products? He wasn’t particular: meth, heroin, and cocaine, you name it. His dealers? A gang of strippers. This has movie of the week written all over it. He had been out on bail on the stealing-from-seizures case. In one of many ironies in this one, he seems to have acquired his taste for stealing and dealing whilst seconded to a DEA Task Force and dual-hatted as a Fed DTF cop.

• An anti-gun cop in Kelso, Missouri, Lt. Jerry Bledsoe, was caught on video trying to shake down a citizen for his guns; then, when the young man, Jordan Klaffer, posted criticism of Bledsoe online, got an order restraining Klaffer from critisism of Bledsoe. The ACLU (!) has come to Klaffer’s defense on the ridiculous restraining order. (We can hear the faint voice of Ken White calling Bledsoe a “censorious %$#^!,” to censor one of the net’s more consistent foes of censorship). We watched the video Klaffer posted, and Bledsoe actually seems remarkably calm and rational then. Dunno what turned him into a ensorious %$#^! later.

• All that massive surveillance, interaction, and bugging data the cops can’t keep in one place? The Navy’s got it. Oh, that makes us feel so much better. (Naval Intelligence in the mid-1990s built an enormous small-arms registration database as a favor for ATF, which is forbidden to keep such records. Dunno if this single-purpose database in Newport, RI, is the forerunner of the LINX domestic-spying network).

• And then there’s this South African cop, who apparently was sleeping during the introduction to gun safety. Lord love a duck.

We just hope he cleaned the shotgun before passing it on to the next fellow.

When guns are outlawed

• Only outlaws will have knives and tell cops, “Honestly, I just felt like killing.” (Victim? His 12-year-old half-brother).

• Only outlaws will have heroin. (These losers actually survived, thanks to the intervention of people better than they are).

• Only outlaws will have big appetites. (Mmmmmm, long pig. Tastes like chicken).

• Only outlaws will have tables. (Hey, the case filing says it’s a “deadly weapon.” But the victim isn’t dead, fortunately).

• Only outlaws will dress like Rambo. (True, this asshat had a gun, but two bar patrons took it away from him and evidently, by the mugshots, beat the snot out of him, which makes the story entertaining even if it doesn’t fit the category well). Moral of story, sometimes clothes don’t make the man, especially if they’re Rambo togs.

• Only outlaws will have fires. And then lie about their “heroism” in fighting them.

• Only outlaws will have sodium azide. Suicide. (Warning at link: Undertone malware). It’s usually an ingredient in airbag propellants; mix it with water and it produces a toxic gas.

• Only outlaws will have vaseline. Accidental self-destruction through amateur breast enhancement.

• Only outlaws will have teeth. This monster bit the nose off an infant. Off his own son. Because the baby was crying.  (Pro tip: babies do that). That’s not all he did as the poor kid also had a skull fracture and brain hemmorhage. May Hell prepare for him a dwelling place.

• Only outlaws will have (1) thumbs and (2) greed: as one hired the other to strangle his girlfriend, a Y2K cold case recently closed with two arrests.

• Only outlaws will lay waste to all Europa, in a German-language blog that reports on murders done, mostly in Germany, without the use of a legally-possessed firearm. (Wouldn’t that be just about all of them? Same as here?)

Gun Policy, Laws and Boring crap like that.

• Here’s an attempt to catalog the crimes of Bloomberg’s Illegal Mayors group. It falls far short, as the the group has had dozens (no exaggeration) of mayors broomed for crimes, ranging from the usual for mayors (bribe-taking) to the unusual, except among Bloomberg mayors: attempted gay rape at gunpoint.

• The Telegraph (UK) asked its readers what sort of bill a Member of Parliament should put forward. Then it took a poll among the most popular six. The winner? Repeal the ban on handguns — by a landslide. We assess the odds of the cousins actually doing this to be approximately zero, but one can hope. Maybe they’re still waiting for the bloodbath the antis promised when Florida and Texas liberalized gun laws in the 1980s and 90s — 20-35 years ago.