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.
We always liked Lex. We liked his blog, for its subjects and its range and its awfully good writing. He had a feisty, combatant’s attitude, and he was a great guy to talk to. Unfortunately, he perished in a crash of the F-21 Kfir aggressor he flew as a civilian contractor at the Navy’s “TOPGUN” …
What does it take for a cop to get suspended? Well, in the notoriously bad Durham, NC police department (the one which has raised ignoring city crime while hazing Duke students to an art form) it takes salvaging parts from confiscated guns, which courts in the liberal, pointy end of North Carolina once ruled had to be …
Ah, wastin’ away again in Margaritaville. In the Florida Keys, a bunch of wastrels got into a machete fight, but apparently were too wasted to connect with the machete. The reason for the upset? The party host ran out of crack at what had been a crack, beer, and valium party. So the irate guests assaulted …
Hollywood, FL, 20 April 14 “Cleaning the gun” So there he was, cleaning his .38, which he dropped. BANG. The press gives him the benefit of a cop-style passive voice: “[T]he firearm dropped to the floor and discharged, hitting the man in the backside.” Yep, shot himself in the gluteus, which makes you wonder what …
It was a single essay that got us to label Straight Forward in a Crooked World as our Wednesday Weapons Website of the Week. It was an essay explaining why it’s a moral ever ever too deep into the motivations of criminals. Bottom line, they chose to be criminals: So the next time you watch the …
Looks like a veritable phalanx of operators. Switchboard type… Science-Fiction Author Brad Torgersen (who’s also an Army reserve warrant officer) mused on this, way back in the Permian Period (ok, way back in mid-March, but we just read the post). The root question is: who gets to be an “Operator?” Explanation: for those who don’t walk …
Aimo Lahti with a Suomi KP/31. Aimo Lahti was born 118 years ago today in Viiala, Finland. He was the greatest gun designer in Finnish history, which makes him a big frog in a pretty small pond. But he was influential far beyond the borders of his Scandinavian homeland. As a Finnish biography by Simo …
The Special Forces Memorial Statue — Bronze Bruce — memorializes our casualties in war and peace, and has done so since the 1970s. The illustrious fallen of the Green Beret welcome Edward Cantrell to their ranks. Image: SFC Jason Baker, US Army SF Command, 2010. Edward Cantrell had been around SF for a while; in …
Typical NIBIN workstation, the IBIS scope. Here’s something that the ATF has done that we all can applaud and support: it honored Allegheny County, PA (think Pittsburgh) for making a 2,500 “hits” in the NIBIN ballistics database. According to the Federal Law Enforcement Officers’ Association (FLEOA) website FedAgent.com, Pittsburgh SAIC Sam Rabadi of ATF presented …
PowerLine is a mostly political, legal and cultural blog started by three middle-aged lawyers. They manage to keep an interesting balance of stuff, but when they talk about guns, it’s almost always in the legal-case or political context. We were amused to see what we hope is a new feature in the blog, occasional reports …