We’re running just a wee bit late this week, so this post is posted late and backdated, and the Saturday Matinee isn’t even posted yet — although its listing on this page tells you what it will be. Sorry ’bout that.

As often happens, this may initially be posted without the links to the stories being live, and they’ll be retrofitted.

The Boring Statistics

This week’s output was close to the median. There was a fairly normal number of posts, 22, slightly down from last week’s 24. A bright spot is the comments, with 41 comments, nearly doubling last week’s count, by press time for this post. Our word count was a near-median 12,000 (approximately). The average post was about 540 words, up from about 460 last week.

Comment of the Week

Pending

The Week in Posts

Here’s the recap of our posts for this week:

• Sunday Brunch began the week with, as usual, a fairly empty post.
• AR is for ARtistry, redux… Turnbull TAR-15 is a notice of availability of a beautiful hand-crafted AR-15 version from a top maker and restorer of old-fashioned guns.
• You know it’s not good when a suicidal Boston cop shoots up Nashua, NH hotel.
• There’s something else that sells like guns…
• We make s conclusion that NYPD FIrearm Training… Sucks. We have evidence backing us — from the RAND corporation and, er, the NYPD.
• We report that Bayonets have long had their enemies – and friends. Presidents, even. (Or a cynic might say that Presidential micromanagement is nothing new).
• A mess of accidents, No. 8 rounds up the armed and the clueless and their impact on the human race this week.
• The Past is Another Country: The Fire Book, 1584 A.D. gives you some great recipes for burning a castle down. Got cat?
• We generally donʼt recommend bringing kung fu to a gunfight, but in this case the guy with the gun didn’t win. Kind of a man-bites-thug story.
• We point to some good Andrew Tuohy preliminary experiments on 1/7 Twist vs 1/9 vs 1/12 for 5.56.
• Fire Book (and Flaming Cat!) follow up takes us back to 1584 and beyond again.
• Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week: Gunmartblog.com. Thanks for the links, back atcha.
• Can you be Silent sans Silencer? A political assassin from 100 years ago speaks from the grave on the subject.
• Letʼs all be safe out there; a public service message borrowed from Clint Smith of Thunder Ranch and Tom Gresham’s GunTalk.
• The veteran versus the vet-hating politician in Virginia.
• In which we ID a gun here, ʼcause comments there donʼt work. And because it’s a weird and wonderful gun in the first place.
• Nathan Haddad update — he’s the vet being treated worse than a murderer by NY cops and prosecutors, because he had five surplus mags.
• Thatʼs not a gun, mate… an 8 Bore elephant rifle is a gun!
• No more “no more hesitation” targets? Not publicly advertised, anyway.
• So how bad is New York? So bad that one bolt-action, one lever-action, and 100 rounds are an “arsenal.” But no one wants to take your guns!
• Saturday Matinee 2013 08: Guns at Batasi. Capsule: more psychology than gunplay. Great writing and a stunning performance from Richard Attenborough in this forgotten 1964 B&W film.
• And now we’ve come full circle, That Was the Week that Was: 2013 Week 08

How we did on last week’s promises (hint: not good)

We promised (and we’ll line out the promises kept)

• a revisit to printable hardware. (this one’s now two week’s overdue)
• a really old book on explosives and incendiaries to turn you on to. (ditto)
• We also have a pile of guns to clean and are trying to figure out how to make that into a blog post. (We didn’t do it, and now there are even more dingy guns! Oh noes!)
• A good Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week

Going Forward

• We’re really going to clean up the backlog of promises from last week. (50/50)
• We’ll check up on some stories from last year we haven’t followed up in ’13 yet.
• We’ve got a story on the last battle of King Richard III (we’ve been trying to pin down the U of Leicester experts on his fatal wounds).
• We’ve got a follow-up on the earliest standard-issue American military rifle scopes. You may remember we had  story on the Small Arms Firing Manual’s single paragraph about telescopic sight, and the Warner & Swasey “Telescopic Musket Sight M1913″ for the 1903 Springfield. Turns out, a book crossed our transom that deals with this scope and its forebears and successors in some depth.

Yikes. With that dismal performance, we’re not even going to make a prediction for next week.