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Category: Allies
Flying commercial used to be fun. Nowadays, it should be outlawed in the Hague as inhuman torture.
I’m old enough to remember when commercial air travel was fun. When I was a young man, your family walked you to and from the gate. When there was any security, it was fairly perfunctory.
At a lot of smaller airports, there weren’t any at all. And yet, air travel was still pretty darn safe. If you needed yet another reason to revile the memory of Osama bin Laden, then there you go.
Nowadays, flying commercial is just the worst. Absolutely everything about it is miserable. Whatever enjoyable tidbits there might yet remain are drowned out by the toxic combination of suffocating paranoia and unfettered corporate greed. My trek to Las Vegas for SHOT Show earlier this year was a splendid example.
The Chaos
In the past, airlines were fractionated into two broad categories. Budget airlines would sell you a ticket from Memphis to Zimbabwe for about 30 bucks. However, once they had you committed, you then had to pay extra for an actual seat, a seat belt, bathroom privileges and oxygen rental. By the time you add all that stuff up, you’ve paid the equivalent of a real-live airplane ticket. They didn’t think we knew that, yet here we are, talking openly about it.
I’m cheap, so I booked with Spirit. They offered a non-stop flight from Memphis to Vegas at a decent price. Right after I secured my tickets, I saw on the news that Spirit Airlines had declared bankruptcy … yet again. I got a helpful email explaining that this would have no bearing on my travel plans. I clearly do not understand the practical machinations of corporate finance terribly well.
Then, I got an email apologizing that my flight had changed. I expected perhaps takeoff time bumped a bit one way or another. Nope. What had been non-stop Memphis to Vegas was now Memphis to Orlando and then on to Las Vegas. Most reputable maps will demonstrate that Orlando is in the exact opposite direction from Las Vegas.
The layover in Orlando was, no kidding, nine hours. By the time I finally got to Vegas, SHOT Show could’ve very well been over. I rightfully canceled that leg of the voyage. A little scrambling found me on the replacement trip via United Airlines, with a brief layover in Denver.
In the past, major carriers like United typically charged a respectable fee, but they were pretty cool about it. Non-alcoholic drinks and some cursory snacks were free. Some of them would even let you check a bag gratis. Apparently, something changed about that since I flew last.
I got these draconian Nazi emails explaining that if I tried to carry anything more substantial than a pack of gum onto the airplane, they would charge me an extra $65. I couldn’t check in until I gave them a credit card.
As a result, I was traveling light, like really light — think indigent Sudanese refugee. My little backpack was about the size of a lunchbox. If you saw some weird guy slinking around the SHOT Show in a loincloth, that would be me. Just blame United Airlines.
The Voyage
I left the house well in advance of takeoff, expecting the obligatory couple of hours of being treated like a master criminal by the sullen security people. I’m not sure exactly how they did it, but Uncle Sam hardwired within me an insensible fear of being late. Perhaps it had something to do with making sure I didn’t fly my Army helicopter into an artillery barrage or leave some poor slob out to die on a forsaken battlefield.
As a result, I am forever just a little bit early for absolutely everything. That’s likely diagnosable on some level. My wife covets your prayers.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) people were friendly enough, meaning they didn’t actually spit on me when I asked if I should remove my belt or not.
However, when I got through the big machine that either renders you sterile (too late, I’ve been fixed) or steals your soul (also too late, that belongs to Jesus), my modest little backpack was nowhere to be found. I knew in an instant that I was doomed.
This little microscopic tube of Colgate set me back more
than four bucks. It should last me about a day and a half.
The Crime
With great trepidation, I approached the stern-looking TSA guy who now squared off against my tiny bag. He asked if I had anything sharp or dangerous packed inside it. I kind of thought ensuring there were no sharp or dangerous objects in my bag was the whole point of the exercise. However, I assured him I had not brought along anything even remotely sinister.
Upon further reflection, I did admit to packing some Pop-Tarts. Pop-Tarts are indeed dangerous but only in the diabetic sense of the term. A Pop-Tart would be a suboptimal tool with which to commandeer an airplane.
The TSA guy focused on my shaving kit. He rooted around for a while and emerged with my toothpaste. Hefting my half-empty tube of Colgate, he looked at me like I was Jeffrey Dahmer’s unwashed psycho cousin. “This is more than 3.7 ounces,” he said, like that should explain everything.
Legit, I then inexplicably apologized for bringing toothpaste on my trip to Las Vegas. I really hadn’t known that toothpaste was somehow intrinsically bad. He then further opined that my tube was too big.
I offered to squeeze most of it out, but he was unmoved. I then reflexively thanked him for stealing my toothpaste and went on my way. I suspect he texted his wife and said, “Hey, sweetheart. It’s been a great day. I just scored some awesome toothpaste from this idiot guy.
Commercial air travel is just the worst. This is me
right after the TSA stole my toothpaste.
The Aftermath
I found a smaller tube of toothpaste for sale in the Denver airport that was about the size of my little finger. It set me back $4.25. I’m pretty sure that’s more per gram than refined plutonium.
Regardless, all’s well that ends well, I suppose. The second leg from Denver to Vegas was delayed two hours, so I had time to type up this GunCrank column while I waited at the gate.
Canada’s long-promised gun “buyback” is already collapsing under the weight of its own bad assumptions, and the early numbers make that painfully obvious.
After years of buildup, bureaucracy, and political chest-thumping, the federal government’s test run managed to recover 25 firearms out of an expected 200. That’s not a hiccup. That’s a face-plant. And it perfectly illustrates why this entire program was doomed from the start.
According to Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), this so-called buyback is nothing more than compensated confiscation. The government didn’t own these firearms. It didn’t manufacture them. It didn’t sell them. Yet it now demands lawful owners surrender them or face criminal penalties because a bureaucrat slapped an “assault-style” label on more than 2,500 models.
Calling that a “buyback” isn’t just misleading. It’s dishonest.
CBC’s reporting confirms what gun owners have been saying all along. The program only targets legally owned, registered firearms. Not smuggled guns, not gang weapons, not black-market pistols driving violent crime in Montreal or Toronto.
In fact, the CBC report openly acknowledges the central flaw: to believe this program improves public safety, you’d have to believe licensed Canadian gun owners are responsible for rising gang violence.
They’re not.
Even worse, enforcement appears optional in practice. A leaked recording caught the federal minister responsible admitting municipal police don’t have the resources to enforce the program. And that it was pushed largely to appease Quebec voters. That’s not public safety policy. That’s political theater.
And the logistics? A nightmare. Provinces are refusing to participate. Police agencies don’t want the job. The Nova Scotia pilot already failed. Yet Ottawa insists everything just needs “clarification,” as if Canadians didn’t understand the instructions well enough to surrender property they lawfully own.
Gun control advocates argue the goal isn’t stopping all crime. It’s preventing mass shootings. But even by that narrow metric, the policy makes no sense. Confiscating hunting rifles and competition firearms while illegal guns continue flowing across borders doesn’t reduce risk. It just punishes compliance.
The real message here isn’t subtle. Law-abiding gun owners saw the program for what it was and refused to play along. Twenty-five guns turned in wasn’t apathy. It was rejection.
Canada’s buyback isn’t failing because it hasn’t been explained well enough. It’s failing because it targets the wrong people, ignores real crime drivers, and treats a fundamental right like a government-issued privilege that can be bought back at a discount.
And that’s not a “step in the right direction.” It’s an expensive, embarrassing dead end.
Categories
Why is Your Barrel Not Threaded?
Well he did (barely) beat Rommel ! Who was sick at the time. Plus his Italian & German troops were exhausted, out of gas, ammo and were outnumbered. But hey, a win is a win! Right?
Just ask his Troops about it after Market Garden! Grumpy
(Mumbling heard about him being a Prima Donna, a very slow mover, overly cautious, hard to get along with as an Ally, a 10 gallon Hat & no cattle etc etc)
Categories
Nerd Defends Property
Eugene Morrison Stoner was born in Gosport, Indiana, on 22 November 1922. He passed away in Palm City, Florida, in 1997. In the intervening 74 years, Stoner established himself as the most successful American firearms designer of the modern age.
When Stoner graduated from High School in 1939, his parents could not afford to send him to college. Instead, he took a job as a machinist with the Vega Aircraft Company. Vega ultimately morphed into Lockheed, which then became Lockheed Martin. They build F-35s and C-130s today.
With war clearly on the horizon, Stoner joined the Marines. He served in the Pacific Theater as an armorer working on large-caliber automatic weapons. Along the way, he developed an abiding passion for firearms. This guy was a born gun nerd.
Though he never attended college or trained as an engineer, Gene Stoner obviously had a gift for mechanical things. After the war, he took a job in the machine shop for Whittaker Controls Inc., a company that produced aircraft components. In short order, he became their principal Design Engineer.
Foundations
George Sullivan worked as a patent lawyer for Lockheed. Charles Dorchester was his brother-in-law. They were gun nerds, too.
Sullivan and Dorchester set about incorporating aviation engineering and materials science that had emerged from the recent global war into the world of small arms. Their first project was a fairly pedestrian bolt-action hunting rifle that incorporated exotic-for-the-day fiberglass, stainless steel, and aluminum components. They called their revolutionary lightweight rifle the AR-1 Para-Sniper. You’ve got to give them credit for cool points.
These two men met Richard Boutelle through an acquaintance at a trade show. Boutelle was a veteran of the U.S. Army Air Corps and also a fellow gun nerd. Coincidentally, Boutelle was also the president of Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation. They built the C-119 and C-123 cargo aircraft and, eventually, the famed A-10 Warthog ground attack plane. Fairchild had some proper resources.
With Richard Boutelle’s patronage, they founded a tiny small arms design group under the overarching umbrella of Fairchild. The company was housed in a small machine shop on Santa Monica Boulevard in Hollywood. It’s hard to imagine that you could once design and build guns in California, but these were obviously different times.
Serendipity
One April afternoon in 1954, George Sullivan was out testing a prototype firearm at the Topanga Canyon Shooting Range.
Gene Stoner was at the same range just turning ammunition into noise. These two guys struck up a conversation that blossomed into a friendship. Sullivan hired Stoner on the spot. He was the company’s ninth employee.
Gene Stoner designed several weapons for the company, including the AR-3, AR-5, AR-9, AR-11, and AR-12. The US Air Force bought a few AR-5s as aircrew survival rifles, but none of the others amounted to much. Then the heavens opened up, and angels began singing.
In 1955, Stoner crafted his masterwork. The 7.62x51mm AR-10 combined cutting-edge materials science with several existing revolutionary gun designs. The direct gas impingement system came from the Swedish AG-42 Ljungman rifle. The in-line geometry wherein the recoil vector traveled directly from the bore into the firer’s shoulder was simply the clever application of fundamental physics. The AR-10 changed the way the world looked at tactical guns.
You all know the rest of the story already. The 7.62mm AR-10 morphed into the 5.56mm AR-15, which begat the M16, which became the M4. Along the way, Springfield Armory adapted the basic design into its superlative line of SAINT modern sporting rifles.
The M16 in all its sundry forms is the longest-serving combat rifle in American history. The AR-15 is the most popular civilian rifle in America. It’s quite a legacy.
Details
Uncle Sam wasn’t terribly keen on the AR-10 early on. There was a tepid effort to include the AR-10 alongside the T44 and T48, guns that became the M14 and the FN FAL, during the U.S. Army service rifle trials back in the 1950s. However, there was a burst barrel in the AR-10, and it fell out of the running. The tech was not quite mature by then.
The geniuses behind the AR-10 never intended to mass-produce guns. They were a think tank. Their mission was to design cutting-edge combat guns that could then be licensed to existing production facilities. Their first serious deal was with a Dutch company called Staatsbedrijf Artillerie Inrichtingen.
Please don’t ask me how to pronounce that. However, these guys had the means to make weapons in respectable quantities. The Dutch AR-10 production ran for five years in the early 1960s. About 5,000 of these early AR-10s entered service with Portuguese Paratroopers.
Most of these guns saw action in Africa. By all accounts, these radically advanced battle rifles performed swimmingly. However, not a lot of them survived to come home.
A Fortuitous Turn of Events
There’s a Biblical parable in the book of Matthew that reads, “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.”
It’s an admittedly awkward analogy, but I live on sites like GunBroker.com. GunBroker is like the world’s biggest gun show running 24/7. One day, while surfing around, something unusual caught my eye.
The rifle in question was the world’s most expensive repurposed parts gun. The parts kit started as one of those original Dutch AR-10 service rifles made back in the 1950s.
Some enlightened individual imported the demilled gun and then built it up again on what appears to be a one-off lower receiver. I had never seen one before.
I didn’t have a great deal of money at the time, but I knew I would likely never see one of these again. I emptied the piggy bank and searched under the couch cushions for spare change, and eventually made this gun mine. It is indeed a treasure.
Particulars
In this old Dutch AR-10, you can see vestiges of greatness. The gun is in excellent shape. The internal components are all hard chromed, something that should have carried over to those Vietnam-era M-16s. The charging handle is a trigger-like appendage located inside the carry handle that does not reciprocate with the action. Pressing the charging handle down locks it to the bolt carrier, functioning as a forward assist device.
The rear sight is drum-adjustable for elevation in the manner of later M-16A2 sights. The front sight blade is generously fenced. The controls are all right where we might expect them to be.
The gas system can be disabled to fire rifle grenades, and the bayonet mounts on top of the barrel. The buffer system mimics that of a modern AR-10, and the gun feeds from lightweight waffle-pattern aluminum 20-round box magazines.
The furniture was formed from foam-filled phenolic polymer with some stamped steel bits added for strength. The sling swivels were mounted on the left side of the rifle rather than the bottom.
The lower receiver on my gun seems crude compared to the rest of it. Curiously, the upper receiver sports English-style pressure-proof data. Unlike that of an M4, the hammer is driven by a coil spring.
Ruminations
Gene Stoner’s very first AR-10 eventually set in motion a sequence of events that led to some 30 million or so AR-variants in service today. That legacy has carried over to some of today’s finest rifles, like the SAINT 5.56mm and 7.62mm firearms, to name just a few.
Like that treasure in the field, when I saw this one come up for sale, I knew I simply had to make it mine. Hefting this amazing old gun is like having my hands on history. And what a history it is.