The Firearm Blog

I ran a poll last week asking the readers if they had bought a gun or not this year. The results:

4% are not buying a gun this year.
39% Will be buying a gun this year.
57% have already brought at least one gun this year.
30% have bought more than one gun this year.

Total Votes: 983

While this is far from being a scientific poll, I am very surprised! I knew you all were gun nuts but now it is official!

As for the 4% of you not buying a gun … I hope you have a good reason It should also be noted that 24% of the visitors to this blog are not in the US.

I will be buying this years second gun soon. After that I will be concentrating on ammo.

The STI Eagle 5.0 and Eagle 6.0 2011 pistols (not to be confused with the Desert Eagle pistol) will be offered chambered in .357 SIG.

STI Eagle 5.0

According to the latest STI newsletter, they got a lot of request for this caliber at SHOT Show ’09. I am surprised, I did not know that this round was that popular. The .357 SIG was developed in 1994 to replicate .357 Magnum performance in a rimless case suitable for semi-automatic pistols.

.357 SIG cartridge.

Tanfo, a Norwegian soldier, reports at the ar15.com forum that they have been having problems with their new HK416 rifles.

Norwegian configured HK416 with suppressor.

One of the problems is that the piston system locks up if the gun is taken outdoors from a warm building when the humidity in the air freezes in the Norwegian arctic conditions. The C8 (Colt Canada full-auto AR-15) that is used by the Norwegian special forces also has this problem but can be fixed in a much more timely manner than the HK416.

Apparently the gas regulator, which that controls the amount of gas flowing into the gas piston system, often switches modes during firing. The gun will not function properly if set to the suppressor mode if a suppressor is not being used.

HK416 Gas regulator

I imagine the Norwegian will have these problems sorted out in the next few years. It does seem odd that they did not identify the problems before purchasing the rifles.

Many thanks to Jay for the link.

The US Naval Air Warfare Center funded a patent application, published two weeks ago, with the innocuous title of “Military Training Device”. The device turns out to be a suicide vest simulator for the Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System (MILES) training system.

The proposed MILES equipped “explosive’” clothing.

The original MILES system was developed in the 1980′s to provide a realistic force-on-force training system for the US Army. The system utilized an array of sensors on soldiers clothing, equipment and vehicles. When a blank cartridge is fired from a MILES equipped rifle, the laser is activated and transmits information about the shooter, his weapon and ammunition. If a laser hits a sensor, the software calculates if the shot was a kill based on the range and what ammunition was being used. MILES is in use by many armed forces including the Australian, British, Czech, Irish, Israeli, Turkish and Canadian armies.

M4 with MILES gear attached. Camp Shelby Joint Force Training Center.
From Wikipedia.

The patent application, number 20090053679, describes a system where clothing is covered in light generating devices, such as LEDs, that when activated broadcast the appropriate MILES codes for a kill over a wide area. Sensors in the “blast” zone would then calculate the distance from the “explosion” and see if it resulted in a kill. Previous simulation systems for suicide bombers have just generated smoke and sound effects.

The Kill Logic

The system also allows for defensive action against suicide bombers. Sensors would also be placed on the bomber and certain hits would be able to disable the bomb – something the Israelis have demonstrated is possible in real life.

Bomber armed with M16?!?!

The patent goes out of its way to be politically correct. The words “suicide bomber” are only used once. From the patent, emphasis mine:

[0040]In act 112, electrical circuit 18 disables offensive capabilities of military training device 10. In the particular embodiment described above in which multiple integrated laser engagement system 14 includes light generating devices 16a as well as light detectors 16b, light generating devices 16a may be inhibited from further operation until the current military training maneuver is completed. In this manner, a particular trainee simulating a suicide bomber may be disabled from inflicting damage to other trainees.

This is a very interesting system and I look forward to seeing it develop. Providing training with this level of realism can only help the troops stationed in parts of the world where suicide attacks are likely to happen.

Many thanks to Daniel Watters for the information.

According to OnPointSupply Glock’s factory in in Smyrna, GA are unable to keep up with overwhelming demand. The factory is running two 8 hour shifts and producing 4000 pistols a day!

They have started to import Glock 19 pistols from Austria to meet the demand. These pistols can be identified by the Austrian proof mark which is an eagle next to the letters NPv (“Nitro Powder proofed”). Austrian guns are proofed with loads that are 30% more powerful that regular loads.

These photos are from a Glock 19 offered for sale at the GlockTalk forum:

The AFP reports that Pakistan will be distributing 30,000 confiscated rifles amongst villagers under the “Village Defence Rifle” programme:

Under the “Village Defence Rifle” programme, chief minister Ameer Haider Hoti has ordered the distribution of rifles among “peaceful individuals and organised groups,” a statement issued by Hoti’s office said.

“The move is aimed at increasing cooperation between people and police to check the activities of terrorists and saboteurs,” it said.

The cache of 30,000 rifles to be distributed among villagers had been confiscated by police from “terrorists and anti-social elements” and guns would be taken back if not used against militants, the statement said.

I think this is a good common sense approach to preventing Taliban encroachment into Pakistan. I hate reading about rifles and other small arms captured in Afghanistan and Iraq being destroyed when citizens are at risk of insurgent attacks.

A blog named Odd Russia has photos of what they claim are a French and Russian bullet that hit each other during the Crimea War.

Odd Russia has many more photos but no link to the source of the images. It could be true, or it could be a hoax. I think both the French and Russians both used muskets or rifles of caliber between .60″ and .70″ and I do not know enough about the ammunition at the time to say if the mushroomed bullets look authentic.

Thanks to Jim for emailing me the link.

I nearly fell out of my seat when I read this. From the an article at The Age (emphasis mine):

In January, John Hanke, the director in charge of Google Earth and Google Maps, hit back at the claims, saying terrorists would still carry out their attacks with or without Google’s help.

“I don’t really think it’s tipping the balance in favour of the bad guys,” Hanke said.

“The evilness is in the philosophies and the desires of those that want to do evil. They will use the tools at hand to do that, whether it’s throwing a Molotov cocktail, or shooting a rifle or using some piece of technology as part of the process.“

Wow! I had to read it twice just to make sure it was not mis-reading it. Google has taken a very dim view on gun related websites in the past. For example, Google advertisements are banned on websites selling firearms.

This actually is the perfect example of “XYZ don’t kill people, people kill people”. Most people love Google Earth and Google Maps, and they love them despite the fact that they are probably used by terrorists planning attacks.

There is currently a debate in the UK about Google Earth showing a top secret nuke submarine base. It sounds to me like there is a bureaucratic problem where government workers don’t want to / can’t pass on military base coordinates to Google, but on the other hand don’t want the images showing up.

The PSDR 3 is a fully suppressed .45 ACP Smith & Wesson Model 625 revolver developed in 1993 by Joe Peters, under contract from Northrhine-Westphalia, for Germany’s SEK (SWAT) teams.

This photo is from Visier Special 6, 1997 (special edition of one of the three big German gun journals):

Click to expand.

Revolvers cannot be effectively suppressed because gas escapes from between the cylinder and the barrel creating noise (there are some exceptions). The big shell that encloses the cylinder of the PSDR 3 prevents the gas from escaping. This combined with a big suppressor and a subsonic .45 ACP round causes a noise reduction from 136 dB to 90 dB which is comparable to a CO2 air gun. Decibels are a logarithmic unit of measurement, so a 46 dB reduction is significant. In theory this gun should make a lot less noise than a suppressed semi-automatic pistol because there no slide slamming open and closed.

I had no idea such a gun existed until Sven emailed me. I really like the idea – German engineering at its best!
Many thanks to Sven, who blog at Defense and Freedom, for the scanned page and translation.

This time it went offline simply because of my incompetence (I deleted an important file accidentally)