An archive of Kevin O’Brien’s posts from the original WeaponsMan website he created in 2011.
Please excuse any typos and issues resulting from scraping the old site. Posts might be out of chronological order.
Short answer — beats us with a stick. And we’ve been studying this for a while. Here is a very preliminary, rough and incomplete hack at the problem in mindmap form. As you can see, there are several ways to look at it: are the guns copies, clones, or inspired? The taxonomy is complex. Even …
In a post we wrote a couple of years ago but that never appeared on this blog (because it was never finished), we wrote about legendary 20th Century riflesmith and cartridge wildcatter Parker Otto Ackley, known to all as P.O. Ackley. PO Ackley made an entire career of making what he called “improved” cartridges. Each …
When you’re completely lacking in a deadly weapon, there are some things you can always count on — like gravity, the mystery force that accelerates everything corewards at 31 fps/s (9.81 m/sec/sec for those of you experiencing gravity in the rest of the world). Charles Murphy, 56, whose hedge fund reportedly invested billions of dollars …
That’s sure what this looks like: Where did it come from? There’s a clue in the pictures, and it’s clearer if you look at this shot of the bare frame… …bare frames…. …rendering… …and print in progress. Yeah, it’s a 3D printed Glock. Cue the media meltdown now. Yes, it does shoot: *Update* Test firing …
You could say she went out with a splash. But this is one more incident of a painful and tragic accidental death in a jurisdiction that has promised its voting votaries Life Everlasting if only they cast out the demon within, to wit, the firearm. In other words, in Oregon, where heavy expenditure of Bloomberg …
This is an old report, but the title is always true. We all know the basic readout on the TSA: No one good, decent, honest, competent, moral, ethical or intelligent has ever been employed at the TSA in any capacity whatsoever. And we haven’t had much to say about them since they walked a bunch of imams affiliated …
Humans are not animals, at least not in our value system. But in terms of mechanisms both physical and behavioral, there’s certainly some commonalities. Behavioral scientists, whose field has picked up in respect what it’s lost in pizzazz since the days of B.F. Skinner, insist that many (some say all) human behaviors can be explained by …
The Rise of Napoleon Bonaparte Here is a fantastic BBC dramatization of the rise of Napoleon as a company and field grade officer. While it’s quite possible to quibble with the historical details and dramatization of the film, and actor Tom Burke looks about as much like Napoleon as he does Shaquille O’Neal, it’s quite …
We’re not really feeling it for a technical post this morning, so instead let’s introduce Andrew, a self-described “gun nut” and the personable host of the one-year-old GY6 Slo Mo video channel. Here is a loooong burst with a gun that solves a problem nobody has, a belt-fed full-auto AR in 9 x 19 mm. …
Weapons content of this film is minimal, but it’s a mostly true recounting of the last months of one of the most significant espionage cases in American histoOry. Robert Hanssen was an FBI Special Agent who, while working counterintelligence against the Soviet target, spied for the Soviets. For 22 years, before being caught (he’s now one …