That Was the Week that Was: 2015 Week 35

This week was a busy one, with two of our Saturday posts (Matinee and this TW3) being posted late, and last week’s overdue Saturday posts never getting done at all.

Sigh. Sometimes you have weeks like that.

But we also published some good stuff, and we worked on some good stuff which isn’t published yet, it part because it was more work than we expected. (Funny how that happens).

what we’re thinking around here.

The Boring Statistics

This week was a slightly above average week. We posted 28 posts with a disappointing 269 comments by press time for this post, and a total of over 22,000 words. If we hit any statistical milestones, we didn’t notice them. .

Comments This Week

As mentioned, our comment count was down (many recent weeks have broken 300, and some even 400 comments. Not last week or this one). But we did get some comments of notable quality, and to our delight, the most commented thread was a technical thread on the 1968 vintage Quiet Special Purpose Revolver.

The Week in Posts

Here’s the recap of our posts for this week (note: (stricken as done)- apologies for the delay, but analog life takes precedence right now):

• Sunday Sticker Shock was our typical not-terribly-on-topic Sunday post.
• We posted a short video from, I believe, the guys at Apex Gun Parts: Crew Drill, Service of the Piece, M1917 Browning. With Kids.
• Here’s a video with the mostly untold (in English) story of Submarines: The Soviet Sub Experience in WWII. Turns out Soviet subs, operating in tough conditions from a surrounded base, made a big contribution to the war in the Baltic.
• When Guns are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Matches. Workers FOOM a whole school monkeying with the lines for the Bunsen Burners.
• Some people are living proof that Not Everyone Should Carry a Gun.
• Plastic Homemade Lowers Under the Hammer — no, not at auction, but literally, beaten to destruction with a hammer.
• How Things Have Changed In National Defense. Well, for one thing, they’re a lot more posh and less utilitarian. For another, any group of bureaucrats now must meet race and sex quotas. Progress!
• When Guns are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Formula 1, but SJWs will make sure Formula 1 drivers can’t have any fun with guns. What’s next, no girls?
• How Criminals Gun Up in Shreveport: With Cop Guns. Title pretty much says it all.
• Gun ID Quiz turns into a brief photo essay on a couple of long Johnsons.
• The Iranians want to nuke Israel. Will Israel Nuke Iran First? (Probably not, but they have to be considering it).
• When Guns are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Tanks. This headline turned out to be incorrect because of incorrect reporting — the poor guy fell off and was run over by an unarmored artillery prime mover, not a tank. Even sadder as the primer mover has good visibility for the driver (unlike any tank).
• Does Prison Look Better, if You Can’t See It? No, says a blind guy, who doesn’t want to go. (Hey, who does? He’s only blind because he got wounded committing a violent crime).
• Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week 2015 35: Vitaly Kuzmin is a great Russian photographer of Russian military and security units and equipment, including some guns Westerners seldom see.
• The Quiet Special Purpose Revolver was a 1960s weapon for tunnel ferrets (which was their original name. A soldier-hating reporter renamed them “rats.” True story!)
• LA Times ID’s Afghanistan’s Problem: Toy Guns! Yeah, that caused it all. We just need to figure out how to get them all playing with Gender-Fluid Barbie™.
• When Guns are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Get Locked Up With Guns. If we can’t keep guns out of prison cells, where is gun control going to work?
• The Thin (and Neat) Blue Perv offered young men a way to avoid getting a ticket — essentially raping them. But the fix is in to keep him out of prison!
• A lot of people think 3D printing is like 2D printing. As you can see in Some days you eat the 3D Bear… it sort of is, if your idea of 2D printing is desktop publishing, circa 1986.
• The archaeologists were expecting some buttons and potsherds, but instead Archaeology Find Confirms 1777 Battle Story when an excavation turned up a blown-up cannon from the Battle of Red Bank.
• When Guns are Outlawed, Only Outlaws will have Dragonflies. Hey, you try driving with one of those things in your eye.
• TSA Protected the Living Daylights out of Her — the woman they dragged off into a rest room to rape. No one good, decent, honest, competent, moral or ethical has ever been employed by TSA in any capacity whatsoever.
• Friday Tour d’Horizon Week 35 rounds up a whole bunch of stuff that would deserve its own post, if we had three bloggers doing three blogs to do justice to ’em all.
• We do some light analysis of Revolvers In ATF Trace Data.
• Musical interlude: Tom Spooner’s “Old Soldier” — Sung in a Special Operations team room
• When Guns Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Market Corrections. And long falls with a sudden stop at the end. Don’t forget to execute a dynamite PLF!
• Something a little different from our usual reviews in Saturday Matinee 2015 35: Uncertain Tomorrow (Web pilot, 2015).
• That Was the Week that Was: 2015 Week 35 — and we’re back around to here.

Going Forward

We have another incident of a questionable police shooting — but is this one really questionable? The cop lightly wounded the suspect, enablling his apprehension, but killed a citizen in the background as he sprayed out-of-control rounds in random directions.

And we should be able to finish our piece on the so-called “Spetsnaz” ballistic knife, whose origins are lost in the shadows of urban (or prison) legend, but which actually came to be made — and banned — as the legend spread in 1983-84.

We have two guest reports on historic sites in St Augustine, FL, from Our Traveling Reporter who is traveling (what else?) in that region of the country, and they’re stuck in the queue for editing.