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.
Inserting spices? There’s horse meat, which some Europeans apparently like. But the EU being the EU, there are regulations about these things, which creates, to the shock of Eurocrats but the understanding nods of economists everywhere, a black market in horseflesh — the sort that comes shrink-wrapped in a market, rather than on the hoof in a …
This document, linked in this post, is official Army doctrine on Special Forces operations. It will be very boring to those of you looking for a JADE HELM smoking gun, or even a lot of nuts and bolts about how SF does things; most of those details live in team and unit SOPs, and those don’t circulate …
Zoos? Yeah. Have you heard the one about the baby in the cheetah pen? “‘Signs your mother doesn’t love you,’ for $500, Alex!” “When you are thrown to this very fast African predatory felid!” “What is… a cheetah?” A woman was dangling her 2-year-old son over a railing at the Cleveland zoo when he fell about 10 …
As we mentioned before, we did win two impulse-bought lots at the Rock Island internet auction. They were a Walther Model 8, an interesting PP forerunner with an internal hammer and single-action lockwork, and three Eastern European Cold War era guns: a CZ 52 in 7.62 x 25, a CZ 50 (similar to a PP) …
One thing about the people of the gun: we’re conservative. By that, we don’t necessarily mean that we want 15 carrier groups back, eager to cut taxes and services, or sorry that mandatory chapel was gone by the time we went to college. There are actually card-carrying ACLU members and ivory tower socialists among us, but they’re conservative …
This morning’s story created quite a stir in ICE, both in the field offices and at headquarters. In the headquarters our little story apparently alarmed an organization called OFTP, the Office of Firearms and Tactical Programs. OFTP used to be called NFTTU, and some ICEmen still refer to it by the old acronym. Anyway, it’s OFTP that wrote the specs …
Maybe it’s the snazzy, Hugo Boss uniforms, but SunTrust Bank is inviting Godwin to the party for Hitler’s Birthday, by sending letters to firearms businesses, punitively closing their accounts for dealing in Administration-disapproved goods and services. Effective on the day that was the highest holy day in National Socialism. The cancellation comes with a 30-day deadline for …
In the world of rimfire rifles, the Ruger 10/22 lives in the equivalent mindspace of the AR-15 in Centerfire World: it’s the center of an entire ecosphere of modular customization. You can buy any component for a 1022 that you might like, except the receiver. Wait! Belay that: there are also aftermarket receivers1 and even “80%” receivers2. And then, there’s …
Weapons users and designers are not generally the same people, and the latter succeed to the extent that they can understand, imagine, and (most importantly) anticipate the needs of the former. The literature on automatic weapons conceptual design is thin indeed. (Don’t take our word for it: let us google that for you). So let’s …
Take Paul F. Doering. But you’re going to have to wait a while, because he’s on his way to Club Fed for a 7 1/2 year vacation. Doering was a Wild West re-enactor with a group called the Dakota Wild Bunch Reinactors (their spelling, and maybe they’re right. What do we know about re-enacting, or …
