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ATF says for short barrel rifles, short barrel shotguns, suppressors and any other weapons, at gun shops you fill out a 4473 and we can roll our own at will as long as our state laws are cool with that.
The further specify they aren't gonna bother trying to sort out who is actually a plaintiff here. Past present and future members of two different gun orgs would be a nightmare to sort through.
I, for one, am not sick of winning yet.
59 years ago, today, the much maligned M1 carbine proved it had what it takes to make good commies!
It is a moment that should be celebrated by everyone everywhere because he was a murderous scumbag who righteously deserved to be shot for even a small portion of what he'd done.
It's a pity they couldn't execute him more than once, to be honest!
Hegseth has said they are going to live stream the execution.
I've long thought that executions should be public, so no problem with that.
What I worry about is if they're going to require a login to watch or just put it there.
The real shame is they will likely bury him in secrecy so his grave don't get violated.
I, alone, and with just one spur, have managed to install the fonts that go missing every time I upgrade the version of Ubuntu!
I hit the search engine and got an answer and, for a change, I've learned enough from the 20.04 days to be able to understand what I was doing!
Go me!
For the most part it doesn't matter, but there's some spacing issues in my T2K conversion where the substitute for Arial doesn't line up quite right and it throws off the entire document.
One of the blocks of rat poison we left out is about 1/4 eaten!
I have no idea how much of a block it needs to consume to meet Rat Jeebus, but this is a good sign we got the right poison!
The insert a picture via URL works on Crispy with Firefox. It does not work on Firefox with Derpy, but does work with Chromium.
Probably a stuck cookie somewhere.
I'd kinda hoped that the OS upgrade would clear it, but...
Manually entering the html code still works on all my computers, but it's a little tedious.
I am sure it was click-bait, but saw a headline that said that they might be using Garands in the firing squad for Nidal Hasan.
What I wanna know is if the Army is a member of a recognized CMP-affiliated club and can prove participation in a marksmanship-related activity or otherwise show familiarity with the safe handling of firearms and range procedures.
I'm reasonably sure they meet the age and citizenship requirements.
Looking up stuff to figure out 40mm smoke grenades led me to look at smoke hand grenades.
The US adopted the AN/M8 back in 1940.
Basically the same as the AN/M7 tear gas grenade from 1935 but burning HC (hexachloroethane) smoke instead of CN (chloroacetophenone). M7A2 and M7A3 burn CS (2-chlorobenzalmalonnitrile).
The M8 was the standard white smoke grenade until replaced by the M83 in 1994, which burns for less time, but emits thicker smoke.
You need to read the markings to tell the M8 from the M83. The M7 is a different color, but externally the same.
The M18 (1942) is the colored smoke version of the M8 and is externally identical, except for the markings and the color shade being painted on the top. We still issue the AN/M18!
We changed our fragmentation grenade five times (or three times depending on how you count it) while we kept the same smoke grenades. Mk II "Pineapple" to M26 to M61 to M33 to M67; though an argument can be made that the differences between the M26 and M61 and M33 and M57 are so small as to not really be a "change."
That tells me we got the smoke grenade so right we couldn't really improve it.
Updated the Mother-In-Law's Lenovo T410 from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04.5 to 26.04.1.
Updating Crispy from 22.04.5 to 26.04.1.
Considering doing the same with DerpyPuter.
Isaias is going to be the first hurricane of the 2026 season.
In October.
Wow.
Isaias is the 9th named storm, which matches the Colorado prediction from July.
We're still three short on hurricanes and one short on major storms this season and it seems unlikely we're even going to get a second hurricane at this point even if we get a couple more named storms.
I don't mind the break at all.
If we're going to fire White women for putting their hair in corn-rows then we have to fire a shit ton of Black women who straighten their hair on the same cultural appropriation grounds.
Fair is fair.
Alternatively, we can be sane and stop with thinking that there's a bad thing called cultural appropriation.
Someone copying your hairstyle is an expression of admiration, not contempt.
I've been trying to Grok the Indian Wars and explain them to people who only get the movie version of history.
And it hit me.
Western Civ did not have total war and the American Indian never didn't have it.
That meant the Indian way of conducting war broke a lot of the rules that the West thought were inherent to having a war.
Unfortunately for the Indians, they learned something on page 2 of the Book of War:
Never teach Western Civ a new way of fighting.
Cowabunga it was.
The elections in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Columbia, Ecuador and Honduras give me hope that our problem at the southern border might be self correcting as sane, non-socialist, policies take hold and allow business and commerce to thrive.
Improving the economic situation at home will make it less likely their citizens want to leave there for here.
That'd be great for all nations involved.
Now, if we could get Mexico on board...
Gun Stats gives a way too small radius of effect for 40mm grenades.
1 yard vs 8 yards.
Something that burns for 25 seconds, as in the case of an M715, should fill more than a hex.
I can't find a video of anyone using a 40mm smoke round to make an evaluation.
An M18 smoke grenade burns for 50-90 seconds and it really doesn't cover the 7 yard radius promised on p.192 of High Tech.
But with about on third the burn time, I'm starting to think that a trail of smoke about a yard wide and extending down wind is what you should expect. Wind speed will determine the height and how wide the screen will get.
So maybe 2 yards in still wind for the 40mm and 7 yards is plausible for the hand grenades.
It's interesting reading about the changes to the M7 rifle that lead to the XM8 rifle that are based on troop feed back.
Almost exactly as if the M7 was a prototype that did troop trials and resulted in a production version!
And troop trials is something that's been sorely missing from weapons procurement since, at least, the Johnson administration.
When you skip handing a new weapon to a private, you lose a lot of important information about how the gun will get treated, used and abused.
Why did we stop troop trials?
The troops keep preferring the wrong gun. That's why the M14 is a T44 not a T48 (aka FAL). That why so many pistol competitions led to the M1911 being retained. It's among the reasons the M4 carbine kept trucking on.
Troop trials find flaws in designs and that leads to politically connected companies not getting contracts! Gods forbid a congressman not get feathers to line their nest!
Troop trials take time and, sometimes, you need to get something out the door in quantity and fix it on the fly. You do this too many times and you get to thinking this is the normal way of things.
This happened when production problems with the M14 led to MacNamara saying, the troops need a rifle, the M16 is a rifle and the Air Force is happy with it, therefore the Army will be happy with it too (even if I have to order them to be!)
It's actually astonishing, considering the political pressure being brought to bear that the Army got a different version of the M16 from the Air Force AND that it got to the troops, as the XM16E1, as quickly as it did.
Vietnam served as the M16's troop trial.
I seem to recall that rollout was a bit bumpy...
It happens occasionally.
We have a fruit rat in the garage.
I thought I heard it chewing on something near the car-parts shelf, but couldn't flush it out.
Tonight we saw the cat food container was well chewed.
Poisons on order.
Deputy who killed Roger Fortson found not guilty.
What a travesty of justice.
This reminds me so very strongly of what happened to Eric Shaw.
Didja know that the US doesn't manufacture or issue 40x46mmSR HE grenades anymore?
While I was doing the research to make Guns Stats versions of them I kept hitting the phrase "production complete."
This raises the question about what rounds are available in T2K.
According to Jane's Infantry Weapons 24th Edition 1998-99 the US issues:
M433 HEDP
M576E1 Shotshell
M661 Green Star Parachute
M662 Red Star Parachute
M715 Green Smoke Ground Marker
M716 Yellow Smoke Ground Marker
M674 CS Tear Gas
Compare with the 1967 Vietnam list...
Does this mean there's no HE around?
No.
HE is still issued by several other nations with 40mm grenade launchers, such as the German DM 11.
40x46mmSR is a NATO standard round after all!
I have a friend who is moderately afraid to come visit Florida because of Florida Man stories.
She's fully convinced that there's alligators in every yard.
Seeing a gator around here is uncommon enough we dive for a camera!
FuzzyGeff recently was in San Francisco and didn't get a single hit on the bingo card for things I see breathlessly reported all the time about the homeless and druggies.
David Freiburger of Hot Rod, Car Craft and Roadkill fame has groused at people hating on the state he was born, raised and still lives in, California.
I know Florida best, and I think it's the same in California as it is here.
There's places you shouldn't go.
Places that are just bad.
What always messes with me about it is how sharp the lines between the good and bad places are. Crime literally does not cross the street at the borders.
When I go looking, I found those lines in Los Angeles. I found those lines in Miami-Dade. I found those lines in Chicago. I know where those lines are in my local area.
There's people living perfectly normal, happy, lives in places that I'd consider a Hellhole because I only hear about the criminals across the line in their areas.
I should probably be less prejudiced.
Sensitivity readers are a thing in gaming.
They walked over from video games and have infected tabletop role playing.
Pretty much all at once it seemed.
It's a pretty specific form of Karen where they play the tape slower and slower until, THERE'S A DIRTY WORD!
I do love the elaborate trap set in it.
If you don't care if Eskimos are offended by being exonymed... You're insensitive and the bad guy.
You can't not care.
You MUST care and you must care CORRECTLY.
What never factors into their decision that you need to be offended for the poor Inuit at being called Eskimos is it mattering.
They never consider the transaction.
What do I get if I stop using Eskimo and start using Inuit?
Aside: I have used the words Eskimo and Inuit more in this post than I have, combined, in my entire life.
If I keep using Eskimo to describe the native population of Alaska, how am I harmed?
Are they as harmed at being called Alaskans, North Americans or Americans?
Because they are Alaskans, Americans and North Americans.
All three terms are exonyms because they are in English.
As for how this actually affects my life... It doesn't.
I wasn't even aware that Inuit were offended by being labeled as Eskimos until someone at Steve Jackson Games decided to make certain they got sensitivity credit when they decided they didn't want to be offensive to the Inuit any longer.
Which brings us to the real point.
If you decide to stop being offensive, just stop being offensive. It's its own reward. Seeking a prize of recognition for it says you didn't do it because it's the right thing to do.
PS: This little debate makes a Homer Simpson line that much funnier, "Lisa, vampires are make-believe, just like elves, gremlins, and Eskimos." It's the Inuit and Yupik themselves who've insisted that there's no such people as Eskimos.
I have given it my gamest shot but I am just not having fun at one of the local breweries any more.
It really got rammed home when the "free" monthly beer I get for being a member of their mug club isn't really worth coming in for any more because it's so fucking crowded and loud.
I might just be finding out how much money I've been spending at breweries if I stay home from now on.
It also means that will no longer risk bugging my friends with my discomfort.
Forgotten Weapons covering the French version of the Beretta 92 reminded me of a conscious decision.
There's guns I collect because I want to experience that gun.
I have decided that those guns will remain unaltered.
Well, mostly. The Hi-Power got new stocks while retaining the magazine safety because the plastic stocks were ghastly and mismatched.
But my Beretta M9 keeps the safety-decocker of the FS rather than the just decocker of the G because my issue gun wasn't a G.
The decocker only is objectively better than the safety in that if I accidentally pull it down while racking the slide, I have not just disabled my pistol by putting it on safe unintentionally.
I've never done it, but I've seen it at matches.
This holds true of any pistol with a slide mounted safety. S&W, I am looking at you.
Magazine safeties used to be something I scrupulously removed.
Now I keep them.
I remind myself that I bought the gun to experience it and the experience includes the magazine safety.
I also, for the most part, don't carry the nostalgia guns or intend to use them for anything serious.
The retro M16 clones stay locked up when we're hunkered down for hurricanes, for example, while the more modern versions of the AR are loaded.
There's two things that people (kooks, really) claim never happened that I am assured did happen by a simple test.
The Soviet Union agreed that they happened.
Those two things are the Moon landings and The Holocaust.
Why is the USSR agreeing they happened such a good barometer?
Because it was in their interest to show that they didn't happen.
I noticed, recently, that we're losing the significance of this as the memory of the Cold War is increasingly in us aging Gen-X minds.
It hit me today, after The Boy's doctor's office called at 0800 that the main reason us night people resent morning people is not that they call at 0800.
It's that morning people are spent by the time us night people are functioning.
We call after lunch and they're just done for the day.
The resentment comes from the expectation that everyone be ready to respond when THEY are ready, but they don't have to respond when WE'RE ready.
When you combine this with the realization that Government hires morning people almost exclusively...
Today the local Hockey team plays their first game of the season.
Eyes crossed for a positive start of the season.
Christa Pike has, apparently survived two attempts at lethal injection.
What the actual fuck?
Say what you will about other methods, most people don't survive the second application.
Hanging is wonderfully good at this.
Ain't dead!
Wait.
The method I like is nitrogen flooding.
Just flood the executing chamber and wait. No hazmat problems!
Harvey and I did Painting with a Twist tonight!
What it was supposed to look like is on the wall. We went our own way.
We used phosphorescent paint so they can glow in the dark under black light.
I mentioned that the real deal was thin on the ground.
The reproduction market has delivered!
It's a little shorter than the universal pouch and subtly wider.
That's so it can hold four 20-round M16 magazines easily!
The markings are inauthentic, but that's good because we don't want anyone passing them off as the real deal.
The material looks the part, but is much more supple.
Pairs well with a Retro M16A1!
I had a T-72B1V in my T2K conversion.
Why would the Venezuelan version of the T-72B1 be in Poland?
Worse, I had it wrong.
I meant the T-72BA which is a T-72B with Kontakt-5 ERA.
I had been calling the T-72B the T-72B1, but mentioned the missile system. The B1 variant is the one without the missile system!
Confusingly, the V suffix, for vzryvnoi, is often used when explosive reactive armor is applied, such as the T-72AV and T-72M1V with Kontakt-1 ERA.
I might even have been using the wrong references and what I meant was T-72M1 and T-72M1V not T-72B1 and T-72B1V.
Happily, it just doesn't seem to come up all that often. The differences between T-72 variations doesn't matter almost all of the times they appear in the game because the players generally lack the means to attack them effectively.
It's clear I need to make me a whole document of these things to go with my Leopard I and Patton files.
We, with the generous assistance of Marv, have done the main portion of putting our Halloween decorations out.
Normally we wait until October first, but this year that falls on a week day and we're impatient!
Every year it's a little different, and we enjoy doing it.
I am proud of myself.
I did not do what I normally do and join the argument offered me.
I guess I am not as complete a moron as I has assumed!
We were at the local brewery and talking with one of the owners about her Disney Princess® moment with some deer on a path behind her subdivision.
We cautioned that a doe can do some real damage if it decides to, and she was accepting of that.
I quipped that the white tail hoof rat is the most dangerous animal in the US.
Enter a third party.
She starts saying that Republican men are the most dangerous thing in America.
Huh?
If that's true she should be more careful around us, huh?
But I didn't even engage with her.
It's not worth it.
I think I figured out the creepy feeling I get about sensitivity readers.
They do not consider how something is meant, only how it MIGHT be taken.
Increasingly it's not even worry about how the person referred to might take it, but how an uninvolved third party thinks that the person referred to SHOULD take it.
Ten to one they never even bother to check with the people they worry about.
I am, just, old enough to remember the flap about adding American to Indian when referring to Indians.
I know several Indians and they are not offended by being called Indian, and they thought it was silly to worry about adding American to it when there's so many other things that matter to them more, or at all.
Indian might be an exonym, but they've adopted the term to describe them because they know it's not meant to be an insult.
Until SJGames started revising the Basic Set, I'd never heard that Eskimo was even an insult, let alone a slur. It was simply a word for the people who were native to Alaska prior to Western Civ taking over.
In Canada things are different, and the populations that Americans would call Eskimos without hatred expressed or implied emphatically reject the word and wish to be called by their own names, such as Inuit or Yupik. Why? Because in Canada, they use Eskimo as an insult and slur (or so I have been informed).
Which is a good an example as any that you can make every word an insult or slur if you say it right.
It's how you MEAN the word that matters, not how the word is taken.
Even dueling societies had the knowing of this!
But the people with the vapors are everywhere making sure they're offended FOR the people who don't have the common sense to be offended for themselves.
At least that's how they act and don't seem to catch how bigoted it is.
As if someone can't tell if they'd been insulted on their own or make a decision about the insult being something to be offended over.
There's a lot of folks I don't give enough shit about to ever feel insulted by anything they call me.
Their, "boos," mean nothing because I've seen what makes them cheer.
I've got Gun Stats stats for all the US 40mm grenades I can find.
Even a couple German ones!
A problem with Gun Stats is the area filled with smoke or gas is much smaller than published numbers would suggest.
I think this is because Gun Stats gives you the instantaneous coverage, but the real rounds burn for a while.
Up to two minutes for a smoke round.
The M651 CS round, for example, calculates to a 1 yard radius, but the specifications for the round says almost 7 yards. But it's got a 20-30 second burn time, so that would let the cloud grow.
I learned about a new-to-me idea for smoke rounds. The canopy version has an X shaped parachute that doesn't slow it down much, but is intended to snag in branches and hang your 90 seconds of smoke from the top of a tree.
Special thanks to Kevin Dockery who tracked down some pretty detailed information and put it on a web page!
Spent the morning on the phone talking to, almost, every department of Florida DCF and Medicaid finding out why they declined to fill The Boy's prescription to his semaglutide.
Four bots and two live people finally got us to...
The primary care provider didn't have the most recent set of blood work because, for some reason, Quest Diagnostics only sent it to his psychiatrist.
I *THINK* I got it sorted out and everyone pointed at the information they need.
Hot buns crossed.
I now await a call from Medicare, 15 minutes late at time of posting, to get that activated.
Tennessee woman on death row demands an all female firing squad.
I think that Harvey is free that day.
