Category Archives: rants

A chat with a controversial sheriff

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So I write a lot of shit. I do fiction (zombie, military sci-fi books and short stories), non-fiction (firearms and history pieces and books), intelligence analysis, and other papers, articles ad nausea. Well I also write a lot of gun politics/legislation/litigation stuff as well– mainly for Guns.com where I have published, according to WordPress, some 1,042 articles since 2012 .

I typically don’t reblog my Guns.com articles over here as I try to stay non-political on LSOZI but decided to make an exception with a story I covered this week.

You see, in Milwaukee there was a horrible double murder after a tragic accident last weekend. In a nutshell, the a 40-year old man, Archie Brown Jr, with his 15-year old nephew in the car accidentally hit a child with his car at a birthday party. When he stopped to tend for the stricken youth, he and his nephew were shot at close range by a party goer and killed. Three people dead. Just like that.

Then the mayor and police chief of Milwaukee jumped in the issue with both feet and decried how lax gun laws in Wisconsin led to this, to which Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke–  a champion of gun rights– took exception.

In the meantime, when the long arm of the law caught up with the birthday party assassin who was hiding out (ironically) in Chicago which has some of the toughest gun laws in the country, he self-terminated. This guy has been in and out of jail since he was 17, was a felon (bank robbery, sexual assault) on parole and prohibited from possessing guns. I guess he didn’t want to go back to Boscobel for the rest of his life and live in a 12×7 with a stainless steel toilet.

So I caught up with Sheriff Clarke and talked to him for 20 minutes or so to get his take on the fall out, and I thought he was very candid.

The article is here.

And if you live in Wisconsin you can donate at your local Associated Bank to the Archie Brown Jr Memorial Fund to help cover funeral expenses.

Think Alcatraz, but a lot colder…

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The NYT has a super in-depth and interesting piece on life inside the ADX in Colorado, where they keep the worst of the worst ranging from Ted Kaczynski and the Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph to 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and 1993 World Trade Center bombing mastermind Ramzi Yousef.

The United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, otherwise known as the ADX, in Florence, Colo.

The United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, otherwise known as the ADX, in Florence, Colo. Where they would keep Magneto if he existed…

The ADX can house up to 500 prisoners in its eight units. Inmates spend their days in 12-by-7-foot cells with thick concrete walls and double sets of sliding metal doors (with solid exteriors, so prisoners can’t see one another). A single window, about three feet high but only four inches wide, offers a notched glimpse of sky and little else. Each cell has a sink-toilet combo and an automated shower, and prisoners sleep on concrete slabs topped with thin mattresses. Most cells also have televisions (with built-in radios), and inmates have access to books and periodicals, as well as certain arts-and-craft materials. Prisoners in the general population are allotted a maximum of 10 hours of exercise a week outside their cells, alternating between solo trips to an indoor “gym” (a windowless cell with a single chin-up bar) and group visits to the outdoor rec yard (where each prisoner nonetheless remains confined to an individual cage). All meals come through slots in the interior door, as does any face-to-face human interaction (with a guard or psychiatrist, chaplain or imam). The Amnesty report said that ADX prisoners “routinely go days with only a few words spoken to them.”

The rest here

And yes, sometimes I think to myself, as long as I had an internet connection that I could pull it off…

Goals

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So yeah, I’ll admit it. I’ve always had kind of an unhealthy interest in flame weapons bordering on pyromania. Even as a kid the flame-pack green army man was the most coveted in the bag.

Well, it looks like someone is crowdfunding a personal one.

Flame weapons, while banned in warfare (Engineering units can still use them for brush clearing etc), are pretty much unregulated in the states, which means everything you see is legal.

More info over at Popsci

Got six SKS’s taking up space in your closet? Want a Gatling gun? Done…

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So yeah, the Rock Island Auction house’s Regional Firearms Auction is this weekend and they have the normal collection of odds, ends, and in-betweens. One of which is a six-barreled, six-actioned, Gatling gun made from a half dozen Chinese Norinco SKS Type 53 rifles. The gun fires by a crank located on the right hand side of the device that turned the whole assembly as it rotates.

click to big up. You are gonna want to big this up...

click to big up. You are gonna want to big this up…

They look to be fitted with 30-round aftermarket mags which would give it a ready capacity of some 180-ish rounds of 7.62x39mm (bring on the Wolf!). The guns look like they are in pretty poor condition with pitted metal showing on most and all have very different serials.

Ian over at Forgotten Weapons calls it the “Redneck Oblitorator”

Value is expected to start at $800, which may be a little high considering what we have here.

Whats the Goldblum line? Oh wait….

My man cave

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Was watching an old episode from the first season of Rod Serling’s epic original The Twilight Zone and came across this scene.

my man cave

And all I could think of was how much I needed this room in my house.

Thought I’d share.

 

So there’s that.

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I don’t know where I’ve been for the past couple years but I just saw one of these the other day. Apparently American Tactical Imports (ATI) has been bringing in what they term as the ATI German Sport AK-47 Rebel Rifle.

1613474_01_ati_gsg_22lr_ak_47_rebel_editi_640

This 22LR Kalash wannabe made by GSG is totally that– it comes just as you see it with a worn look, hippy bandana tied around the stock, first aid tape wrapped liberally on the foregrip, magazine and elsewhere to make it look as if it was just recovered from a Somali pirate, Liberian child soldier, or Narco-terrorist somewhere in Chihuahua.

gsg-gerg2224ak47r-813393016219-6

And they run about $400~.

Just me but Id rather by a Yugo made import for about the same price that shoots 7.62×39 and I’ll give it my own worn look overtime.

Tape and bandanas I got.

Bringing my beard token

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Beard-Tax-Token

In 1705, Emperor Peter I of Russia instituted a beard tax to modernize the society of Russia following European models. Those who paid the tax were required to carry a “beard token”.  This was a copper or silver token with a Russian Eagle on one side and on the other, the lower part of a face with nose, mouth, whiskers, and beard. It was inscribed with two phrases: “the beard tax has been taken” and “the beard is a superfluous burden”.

Guess I'd have to pack a beard token these days.

Guess I’d have to pack a beard token these days.

 

Its always the Life Buoy

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Over the years I got to be quite a connoisseur of soap. My personal preference was for Lux, but I found Palmolive had a nice, piquant after-dinner flavor - heady, but with just a touch of mellow smoothness. Life Buoy, on the other hand...

Over the years I got to be quite a connoisseur of soap. My personal preference was for Lux, but I found Palmolive had a nice, piquant after-dinner flavor – heady, but with just a touch of mellow smoothness. Life Buoy, on the other hand…

That’s it, no more posts today. Keep your mouth clean tomorrow, and be safe!

Ragged Claws

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As a kid I dearly loved Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (O.K., so I was an odd kid). The horribly grim tale of Charles Marlow’s trip down the 19th century Congo to see Mr. Kurtz was chilling and I felt like I could almost taste the dark water. My favorite character was the slightly fractured Russian simply called the “Harlequin” in the book.

When I saw Apocalypse Now for the first time as a teenager, I was likely the only one in the room who had read Conrad and found myself jumping up and down when I ran across Dennis Hoppers character.

Hey, man, you don't talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he'll... uh... well, you'll say "hello" to him, right? And he'll just walk right by you. He won't even notice you. And suddenly he'll grab you, and he'll throw you in a corner, and he'll say, "Do you know that 'if' is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you"... I mean I'm... no, I can't... I'm a little man, I'm a little man, he's... he's a great man! I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas...

Hey, man, you don’t talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The man’s enlarged my mind. He’s a poet warrior in the classic sense. I mean sometimes he’ll… uh… well, you’ll say “hello” to him, right? And he’ll just walk right by you. He won’t even notice you. And suddenly he’ll grab you, and he’ll throw you in a corner, and he’ll say, “Do you know that ‘if’ is the middle word in life? If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you”… I mean I’m… no, I can’t… I’m a little man, I’m a little man, he’s… he’s a great man! I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across floors of silent seas…

For those who didn’t know, Hopper’s character was also based on Sean Flynn, an American freelance photojournalist who disappeared in 1970 in Cambodia and to this day has never been seen again.

Just thought I’d share. By the way, here is a link to a free audio download of The Heart of Darkness for sticking around through the end of this post.

D.C. museum acquires rifle of America’s ‘first active shooter’

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charles whitman Remington 700 ADL, 6 MM CAL with Leupold scope

Perhaps one of the most infamous firearms ever carried by a criminal in his final act, the bolt-action rifle among those used by Charles Whitman in the 1966 University of Texas shootings, is now on display in the nation’s capital.

whitman rifle

The gun, a Remington 700 ADL in 6mm with a vintage Leupold scope, believed to be the same one that Whitman climbed to the top of the 28th floor observation deck of the UT main building and among the guns used to kill 12 people with, was acquired in a private transaction by the National Museum of Crime and Punishment in Washington D.C. for an unknown sum.

622x350

The gun had been offered for sale for $25,000 in September and still has handwritten scope ballistic adjustments (aka “come ups”) on a piece of tape affixed to the rifle’s butt stock.

Its morbid, but its still history.

More over in my column at Guns.com

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