#UnitedKingdom

There was a Tweet from the West Midlands Police (United Kingdom) that woke my interest.

The Northumbria Police serves a population of around 1.5 million people and covers an area of more than 2,000 square miles in the North East of England.

The National Crime Agency in United Kingdom just made huge news as they arrested eight people and seized 79 illegal firearms hidden in engine blocks.

If you’re in London please take time to visit one of the Imperial War Museums.

The largest collection of original James Bond Vehicles is now displayed at the London Film Museum at Covent Garden.

It’s not just the Yanks that are getting improved ammunition: Our friends across the pond have developed their own firepower upgrade for 5.56mm and 7.62mm weapons alike. Jane’s has a modest article on the subject, while The Register provides a quite good overview of exactly what the new rounds are and what they mean for today’s Tommy:

On Saturday we looked at one British  “contender” which could have in some alternate reality become the NATO standard round, and today we’re going to look at another: The 4.85x49mm. After the United States adopted the .223 Remington round as the 5.56x45mm in the mid-1960s, a race began among NATO member nations to create and adopt something similar. Lest the Organization lose the benefits of standardization if a member nation pre-emptively adopted a new SCHV round, these efforts force NATO to begin a competition for a second NATO-standard infantry round. Entrants from the USA, France, Belgium, Germany, and the UK competed head-to-head, and while it was the Belgian 5.56mm SS109 that emerged victorious, the 4.85x49mm round submitted by the UK was ballistically impressive enough to warrant a second look.

Here is another unknown machine pistol that I’ve posted a short write up on via the ARES blog. A number of these have been appearing in the hands of Italian and British crime groups, one even being seized in a Real IRA weapons cache. Along with the ‘R9-Arms’ pistol It appears most likely to be Croatian in origin with obvious false branding. It most definitely has nothing to do with Intratec or the real TEC-9 pistol.

In the twilight of the blackpowder era, the British tested many designs in one of the biggest firearms competitions of the era, in an effort to replace their increasingly obsolete Martini-Henry rifle. The winning design was the brainchild of Scottish-American designer James Paris Lee, one of the great geniuses of late 19th Century firearms design. Lee had invented the detachable box magazine – which my readers will recognize as the foundation upon which the collective fire modern rapid-fire individual firearms have been built –  which he patented in 1875, and then combined with a sturdy and simple action, creating a rifle that was ahead of its time in a way that few weapons with a comparable legacy can claim.

While on my trip in the UK, I noticed a staggering amount of armed police officers guarding the gates to castles and palaces. These were not security guards but actual police officers. All were armed with Glocks and a couple of them were armed with either a MP5 or MP7, and this was at every place I went to.

The Tower of London is a cool place to learn about the history of England. In the center there is the White Tower. It houses the Royal Armouries collection as well as gifts given to the Crown. As one of the Yeomen Warders (the Beefeater guards) had said: “I say gifted, but usually at the end of a blade or gun”

While I was in London, last Saturday, I was doing the touristy thing by going to see the changing of the guard. A tourguide had recommended that I go to St. James Palace to see the guards up close. As I was walking to St. James Palace I stumbled across the Beretta Gallery. As an American in London, I had preconceived notions of firearms and their relation to the UK. What I discovered inside this store blew my mind.