Category Archives: War On Terror

HITRON: Hunting drug dealers from helicopters with the USCG

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The United States Coast Guard has, since 1916, been the preeminent maritime law enforcement and search and rescue agency in the country. This odd coin with two very different sides has produced a military force that has to be flexible to meet challenges that no one could imagine a hundred years ago. To stop the myriad of high tech superfast smugglers who try to outrun the fuzz, the Coasties have created a unique unit to take super high-powered rifles to the air. These helicopter borne snipers are the men and women of the Helicopter Interdiction Tactical Squadron (HITRON).

Read the rest where I delve into the weapons of this elite group of coasties at GUNS.com

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The Semmerling LM-4 Pistol: Sleek, strange, secretive, sought

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Sure, it looks like a smooth little semi-auto mouse gun but, as with many things in this crazy world, under it’s sleekness hides some strangeness. First, it’s not a pee-shooter, but rather a 5-shot .45 ACP hardballer. Second, its not semi-auto at all but rather more of a pump-action. It’s the Semmerling LM-4, and though it may look like a swan to some, at its heart it’s still one odd little duck.

Since the beginning of modern time, there have been rough handed individuals whose services are retained by certain quiet branches of the government to maintain a fragile system of covert operations. These individuals are sent to exotic places, meet interesting people, and occasionally have to fight for their lives to make it back home.

In the 1970s, a small shadowy company in the Boston area by the name of the Semmerling Corporation began producing a compact little gun for the special purpose of arming such individuals. The primary tenants of the pistol was that it be a small and durable as possible, with absolute reliability but crucially pack a decent punch—no mouse guns, as the gun was to allow a covert agent working deep cover, to have a concealed firearm to engage in violence if they could not otherwise extract themselves from the situation.
Read the rest in my column at GUNS.com

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3D Printed Pistol Gets Shut Down by State Department

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Cody Wilson, maverick firearms geek behind the printable gun craze is back in hot water again.  This time its for the design of his new single shot (single use) Liberator pistol. The thing is, he didn’t even sell it, he gave it away. This brought the ire not of the ATF, FBI, or some other law enforcement organization– but instead, the State Department.

After all the original Liberator was designed as a throwaway ‘gun to get a gun’ that could be dropped to resistance fighters behind enemy lines during World War Two. It seems that some overseas governments may be scared of letting this genie get out of the bottle.

As crazy as it sounds, this is for real.

Read the rest in my article in Firearms Talk.com

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The L85 British Bullpup: The last Enfield

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It’s hard to imagine today but for over 150-years the UK firearms arsenal at Enfield armed the world. Their 3-band rifles were the go-to gun of the US Civil War and their Short Magazine Lee Enfield bolt guns kept London from having the street signs redone in German through two world wars.  Then in 1985, everything went pear-shaped.

In 1954, RSAF Enfield and BSA began production of the 7.62x51mm NATO caliber L1A1 Self-Loading Rifle for the British military to replace their long-serving stocks of Short Magazine Lee Enfield Rifles, a design that had lasted the Brits for nearly 70 years. The L1A1 was a version of the Belgian FN FAL rifle, set up in semi-auto and using SAE or ‘inch-pattern’ templates rather than metric. It proved a hard serving rifle and saw use in the Suez, Malaysia, Aden, Northern Ireland and the Falklands as well as being adopted by close allies Canada, Australia, and New Zealand among others. However by the late 1970s, the L1A1 was a bit long in the tooth, and well, a bit long overall (45-inchs) as well. With most of NATO at the time already using smaller, 5.56mm-chambered rifles such as the M16, FAMAS, and HK33, the UK decided to get on the smaller caliber/smaller weapon bandwagon.
Read the rest in my column at GUNS.com

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The Rough Parts of Going while Carrying

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No matter whether you call it dropping a deuce, hanging 10, the call of nature, a trip to the water closet, or going code brown, everyone has to seriously relieve themselves at some point. Often this situation presents itself when you are out and about in a public venue. If you are armed this leads to the dilemma of what do you do to keep your firearm safe while you drop trou. Here are the options:
Read the rest in my column at GUNS.com

(Which one of these stalls would you pick? If you choose the one with the dead wall on the strong hand side that your firearm is on…good choice!)

CORRECTION Mens Room Tourism

The Suppressed ‘Shaft’ and ‘Threadcutter’ Rifles: One bad mother, shut your mouth

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Thought historically tight-lipped about all things military, one thing the Russians have never kept secret is existence of their robust special operations, or spetsnaz, community, which they have fostered for many generations. These operators fielded the finest hardware found East of Berlin and, going back to the 1980s, the Soviets had an itch for a long-range suppressed rifle and scratched it with a Shaft and a Thread Cutter, so to speak.

Formed in the 1950s from lessons learned fighting the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany, the spetsnaz (a Russian acronym for special purpose) units were bad hombres and by the later Soviet era, spetsnaz troops (roughly the commie version of the special forces/ranger type units) were a huge part of the Motherland’s military machine. At the height of the Cold War, the Soviets had no less than 14 army and 2 naval brigades of these troops compared to the sole US Army Ranger regiment and five Special Forces groups.

These groups in general, by the nature of their role on the battlefield, have long sought out suppressed weapons and on both sides of the curtain, most got by with regular issue guns with fitted external suppressors. By the early 1980s, they wanted something better and that is where the VSS and AS came in.
Read the Rest in my column at GUNS.com

AS on top with folding stock and VSS on bottom with fixed wood stock the guns share internals

Cally ARNG Goes Head to Head with LA Riot…

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A pretty good article written by a California National Guard Captain who experienced the sharp, woodland camo tip of the 1992 LA Riots is up over at Breitbart

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From the article, “Flyers urging violence against law enforcement in service of the “insurrection” were commonplace during the riots.  The flyers were written and printed by Communist organizations—which seemed ironic, given the fall of the Berlin Wall only two-and-a-half years before.  Strangely enough, the El Salvadoran Communist guerrilla group FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) has an ongoing presence in Los Angeles, where they participate in the city’s annual May Day parade, carrying their red banners.

On May 3, with the military taking a lower profile, gang members began to show more defiance.  Rumors were flying around that the military had no ammunition or wasn’t allowed to shoot.  We were very concerned about what might happen the next night when Mayor Tom Bradley was expected to lift the nighttime curfew.

As fate would have it, a gang member wannabe tried to run over a team of Guardsmen at a checkpoint.   On his third pass to try to kill the soldiers, they fired 10 rounds at the tires of the onrushing car.  He pressed on towards the checkpoint.  So, the soldiers shifted fire, killing him with two bullets to the head and one in the shoulder.  The next morning, the gang members wouldn’t even look us in the eye as we made a limited number of patrols.  They knew the Guard could shoot to kill.”

Read the rest here     

New York Town Bans Gadsden Flag

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Before this week, the quiet little city of New Rochelle, New York was perhaps known as the hometown of American Pie writer Don McLean and of 1960s “Catch me if you can” conman Frank Abagnale. Going further back, during the Revolutionary War, George Washington stopped in the town on his way to assume command of the Army. Patriot Thomas Paine considered the Father of the American Revolution because of the pamphlet “Common Sense” he penned, settled in New Rochelle after the War of Independence and was buried there.

This is even more shocking because the city council just banned the historic Gadsden Flag from being flown on city property.
Read the rest in my column at Firearms Talk.com

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Spending the next week on the range….

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Instructing a class in exotic far off lands (yet still in the CONUS!)

Did you know the USFWS shoots their own special target? Seeing lots of these lately!

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Now thats a lot of spent brass to pick up….

Ever heard of Ana Montes, well most other people havent either.

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“Ana Montes has been locked up for a decade with some of the most frightening women in America. Once a highly decorated U.S. intelligence analyst with a two-bedroom co-op in Cleveland Park, Montes today lives in a two-bunk cell in the highest-security women’s prison in the nation. Her neighbors have included a former homemaker who strangled a pregnant woman to get her baby, a longtime nurse who killed four patients with massive injections of adrenaline, and Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, the Charles Manson groupie who tried to assassinate President Ford.

But hard time in the Lizzie Borden ward of a Texas prison hasn’t softened the former Defense Department wunderkind. Years after she was caught spying for Cuba, Montes remains defiant. “Prison is one of the last places I would have ever chosen to be in, but some things in life are worth going to prison for,” Montes writes in a 14-page handwritten letter to a relative. “Or worth doing and then killing yourself before you have to spend too much time in prison.”

Like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen before her, Ana Montes blindsided the intelligence community with brazen acts of treason. By day, she was a buttoned-down GS-14 in a Defense Intelligence Agency cubicle. By night, she was on the clock for Fidel Castro, listening to coded messages over shortwave radio, passing encrypted files to handlers in crowded restaurants and slipping undetected into Cuba wearing a wig and clutching a phony passport.

Montes spied for 17 years, patiently, methodically. She passed along so many secrets about her colleagues — and the advanced eavesdropping platforms that American spooks had covertly installed in Cuba — that intelligence experts consider her among the most harmful spies in recent memory. But Montes, now 56, did not deceive just her nation and her colleagues. She also betrayed her brother Tito, an FBI special agent; her former boyfriend Roger Corneretto, an intelligence officer for the Pentagon specializing in Cuba; and her sister, Lucy, a 28-year veteran of the FBI who has won awards for helping to unmask Cuban spies.”

Read the rest at the Washington Post

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