26th MEU/USS Bataan Group Sail Exercise

NOTE:  What is a "Sail Exercise" and when did it come into usage in the Marine Corps?  The photographer of this set and one previously continue to label them as such and I can't ever remember hearing the term before.

Quick reminder about the Clinton Gun Ban.

Everyone is pointing to the Clinton Gun Ban as a great time in American history.  What everyone forgets is that same gun ban led to the rise of the militias (hardcore militias).  If that ban is reinstated then I personally know of entire neighborhoods that would have to be searched in order to collect all the weapons.

I know of some guys that even have weapons buried in PVC pipe.

Gun sales will explode, ammo will rush off the shelves and you'll have 50 years of gun sales happen in a matter of months.  And those people will go under ground with them.  There is no way that the ATF, FBI and National Guard could search all the homes necessary to put the genie back in the bottle.

Last but not least the President's agenda will be crushed.  Implementing Obama Care and fighting off all the pissed people because of the increase in insurance premiums would be enough to keep any administration occupied but add Amnesty for illegals, Climate Change that some are pushing, the economy still struggling, trouble overseas and the unforeseen stuff that always pops up, I JUST DON'T SEE HOW THEY CAN FIT IT IN WITHOUT SACRIFICING SOMETHING ELSE!

26th MEU Group Sail Exercise

Historical Proof! Armed Educator stops school attack!

MAJOR THANK YOU TO TONY FOR FINDING THIS!  Read it all gents!

A principal and his gun

by Wayne Laugesen

This article was originally published in the Boulder Weekly, and is posted here by permission.

Oct. 15, 1999. More from the Independence Institute on school attacks and armed resistance.

Vice Principal Joel Myrick held his Colt .45 point blank to the high school boy's head. Last week, he told me what it was like. "I said 'why are you shooting my kids?' He said it was because nobody liked him and everything seemed hopeless," Myrick said. "Then I asked him his name. He said 'you know me, Mr. Myrick. Remember? I gave you a discount on your pizza delivery last week."

The shooter was Luke Woodham. On that day in 1997, Woodham slit his mother's throat then grabbed a .30-30 lever action deer rifle. He packed the pockets of his trench coat with ammo and headed off to Pearl High School, in Pearl, Miss.

The moment Myrick heard shots, he ran to his truck. He unlocked the door, removed his gun from its case, removed a round of bullets from another case, loaded the gun and went looking for the killer. "I've always kept a gun in the truck just in case something like this ever happened," said Myrick, who has since become Principal of Corinth High School, Corinth, Miss.

Woodham knew cops would arrive before too long, so he was all business, no play. No talk of Jesus, just shooting and reloading, shooting and reloading. He shot until he heard sirens, and then ran to his car. His plan, authorities subsequently learned, was to drive to nearby Pearl Junior High School and shoot more kids before police could show up.

But Myrick foiled that plan. He saw the killer fleeing the campus and positioned himself to point a gun at the windshield. Woodham, seeing the gun pointed at his head, crashed the car. Myrick approached the killer and confronted him. "Here was this monster killing kids in my school, and the minute I put a gun to his head he was a kid again," Myrick said.

True humanitarian

I've been intrigued by Myrick ever since that day. Most have never heard his name, because the mainstream press barely reported how the massacre was stopped. I've become more interested in Myrick's story with every subsequent mass murder. If only someone like Myrick had been at Columbine, I've pondered.

A few months ago, Soldier of Fortune Publisher Bob Brown asked me if I had any suggestions as to whom should receive his magazine's Humanitarian Award of 1999. In the wake of Columbine, the answer seemed clear: Joel Myrick. Brown talked it over with his staff, gave it some thought and went with my choice. Brown and I will present Myrick with his award Friday in Las Vegas, at the annual Soldier of Fortune Convention and Expo.

Myrick and his gun, no matter how one looks at it, saved lives. His actions saved the lives of waiting victims at a nearby junior high. He may have kept Woodham from shooting police, who would have arrived at the scene disoriented, without Myrick's home turf frame of reference. Arguably, Myrick and his gun even saved the life of the killer, who likely would have killed himself or been shot by SWAT cops after spilling more blood.

Although Myrick saved lives, beyond question, some treat him as a leper. After the shootings, and the relatively peaceful ending to something that could have made Columbine pale in comparison, Myrick was in exile. He'd held a gun to a student's head, and his colleagues simply couldn't accept that.

"Nobody wanted to dog me, but nobody wanted to side with me, either," Myrick says. "I felt like I was being betrayed by everybody." 

And that was Mississippi. This summer he studied at Harvard, where he'd been awarded a prestigious education fellowship. That's when uppity intolerance and mass stupidity took on new meaning for Myrick. "Once people found out my story, I got a lot of dirty looks and strange stares," Myrick said. "A few people confronted me."

Myrick shouldn't feel bad. Only goofy losers gave Myrick funny looks, and such people never learn. Myrick's gun, and his ability and willingness to use it, saved lives plain and simple. Yet somehow, in the minds of the anti-intellectual gun control crowd, he's a bad man who did an immoral deed.

By any sane, rational view, Myrick is a life-saving humanitarian. Even in my view, however, his heroic act will be marred by an asterisk in the annals of history. Despite the presence of this brave man, two students still died. Therefore, the footnote of far off history books will read something like this:

*The late 20th Century was an era of crude polemics, in which some people believed hardware items, such as handguns, caused mass murders.
Therefore, ineffective laws that reflected this view made it illegal for this legendary hero to have his gun on campus. The gun was in a truck, giving the killer valuable time as Myrick ran to retrieve it. In modern society, of course, responsible adults have better access to hardware than killers do.

Arguing with a moron

Myrick is as much of a hero as the law would allow. He was only seconds away from the shootings, yet the law had him far away from his gun. Federal law precludes anyone but a cop from having a weapon in or near a school. The modern spree of school shootings began sometime shortly after this law was enacted. In most places, state and local laws needlessly duplicate the federal law, serving only to accommodate political grandstanding.

In Pearl, federal, state and local laws helped Luke Woodham shoot nine students. The deer rifle had to be reloaded after every shot. To hit nine students, Woodham needed time. The moments it took Myrick to reach his gun are what allowed Woodham to continue shooting and almost escape. Gun laws, and nothing else, gave Woodham that time. 

But talking to gun control advocates is like talking to five year-olds. Tell a five-year-old it's time for bed, and he'll say "No." Ask why not, and he'll say "because." Likewise, I've told a few gun control advocates about Myrick-telling them how he would have saved more kids had it not been for gun laws-and they've said "guns kill." Or, "we have too many guns." Or, "Woodham killed his victims with a gun."

At which point I say, "Woodham violated several gun laws by having his gun on campus. The law did nothing to deter him, but plenty to deter the man who set out to stop the killings." To which a gun controller replied: "But guns kill."

Sucked in and trapped by this bizarre logic, I attempted to address it. I said: "But Joel Myrick's gun didn't kill. Rather, it allowed children, including the deranged killer, to live."

"Yeah, but all of these school shootings are done by guns," he told me.

So I pounded my head against a wall. Politics and sociology are complex. But if any socio-political issue should be a simple, exact science, it's gun control. All honest modern studies show that gun control, in this culture, benefits criminals while leaving law-abiding victims defenseless.

In his book More Guns Less Crime, Yale law professor John Lott ran the numbers every which way possible. He set out to write a book about guns being bad, and found that every gun law ever enacted in this country has resulted in more violent crime. I saw him on TV recently, debating a gun control advocate. Lott cited numbers and anecdotes. His opponent, in essence, said "but guns kill."

Politics of nothing

Right here in Boulder, a city of self-proclaimed enlightenment, city council members are hard at it trying to enact more gun control in the light of Columbine. Weird. Today in Boulder, it is absolutely illegal in every way, shape and form for a student to walk onto, or anywhere near a public school with a gun of any kind. Remove all state and local gun laws, and you still have a federal law that clearly forbids firearms of any kind within 100 yards of public schools.

Anyone who shoots up any school, anywhere, is violating gun laws. So what does the Boulder City Council think up to address the very real concern of school massacres? Hey, let's pass some gun laws. Duh. "If we can save one life," it would be worth it, Councilman Dan Corson told the Daily Camera.

If the city council manages to craft a gun law that isn't redundant to the Nth degree, it will serve only to make victims of future massacres more defenseless-guaranteed. Some politicians know this, but they don't care. What matters is how the public perceives the headlines their words garner. Guns kill. Duhhh. "Let's outlaw guns."

Gun control was essential to Hitler and slave owners in the Old South. Proven fact: Gun control oppresses and kills. Proven fact #2: Responsible adults, such as Joel Myrick, save lives. When unencumbered by bizarre gun laws, they can save even more lives.

So let's appeal to the Boulder City Council and the Boulder Valley School Board to explore ways of empowering law abiding adults. Perhaps it's time for the school district, with the full support of city hall, to establish a voluntary defensive weapons training course for teachers and administrators. Politicians who find a way to balance the firepower between forces of good and evil, by arming some teachers and administrators, might not get re-elected. But they might preclude a future disaster like Columbine, where SWAT teams sat helplessly in a parking lot while a teacher in the building prepared to fire at the shooters with a fire extinguisher.

Have a good laugh at this idea, on me. Then ask yourself whether it's more important to be re-elected, or to cut short a future school massacre.

We will never rid society of guns unless we eliminate the natural phenomenon of internal combustion. A gun is a crude instrument and nothing more than a controlled explosion. America is home to about 250 million of them, and they're with us to stay regardless of law. 

If you want to save lives, the answer is simple. Stop keeping guns from the hands of would-be heroes-the only people who obey gun laws. Joel Myrick had a gun, legally in his truck. Myrick and his gun saved lives, but they could have saved more. The lesson: Some guns save lives.

 

My sympathy to the families but...

I'm watching the news and the tragedy in CT is hitting hard.

But before everyone gets caught up in an emotional fury and decides that all gun owners are wrong we must realize an undeniable fact.

You can't regulate evil.  You can't keep a twisted person from killing if they really are determined to do it.  Whether by vehicle, improvised explosive device, by baseball bat or by butcher knife...evil will find a way to kill.

Gun Control doesn't work and won't make anyone safer.  Life is hard.  Get harder.

NOTE-To the leftist out there that want stricter gun control be advised.  Right after the election of President Obama to a second term gun sales spiked, after this incident they're gonna spike even higher.  Now instead of people buying enough supplies for defense, hunting or recreational shooting now they're going to buy in case firearms are outlawed.  All you're doing is laying the ground work for a MASSIVE black market in the future.  Gun control will work about as well as the prohibition on alcohol, the war on poverty and the war on crime (which this is) and the war on drugs (an adjunct to the war on crime).  The solution is painful because it requires individuals to be held responsible for their actions.  That's the key.

Australia Special Operations picks Lockheed Martin vehicle.

I originally was going to post a story about Australian Special Operations picking the SupaCat for its next vehicle.  You can read about it here...but what caught my attention when I went to their website was this tidbit at the end of the description of the vehicle...

Designed by Supacat, the HMT product is manufactured under licence from Lockheed Martin.

Wow.

Lockheed Martin bears watching...not only their US operations but also European holdings.  It really makes sense though.  The hole in their defense portfolio is in ground vehicles, the next logical move for LM is to buy up a small to medium company.  I'm still betting Oshkosh but time will tell. 

1st Battalion, 11th Marine Regiment live fire.

I never thought it possible...

I never thought I would reach a point where big breasts and a slim waist weren't turn ons.  Thank you English Russia for killing the dream.  See the rest of the photos of these ladies women girls humans individuals aliens from another world here.

*NOTE*  SNAFU! would like to apologize for the possible destruction of your retinas due to the viewing of the above photos.  Our sincerest apology and a "make right" follows.  Enjoy.

AH-1Z. The most powerful, capable and advanced attack helo flying today.

The AH-1Z is the most powerful, capable and advanced attack helo flying today.  The Apache, Tiger, Mangusta, Roovalk, HIND, Alligator and others just can't compare.

Or so I've been told..and I can't lie, the arguments in favor of the Viper are compelling.  What say you?

Know your enemy. Chinese PTL02 100 mm Assault Gun

photos are from the Air Power Australia website.

Meet the Chinese version of the French VAB.  According to the Air Power Australia website...

The PTL02 assault gun is the WZ551 equipped with the 100mm Type 86 high velocity smoothbore cannon with a six slotted muzzle brake, fume evacuator and a thermal sleeve. Nothing like the the German and Russian assault guns of the Second World War, it can be compared to the M1128 Mobile Gun System, which is part of the Stryker LAV family. There are three 76mm smoke grenade dischargers either side of the turret and a cupola mounted QJC 88 12.7 x 108mm heavy machine gun. 
 For an assault gun the vehicle is also very thinly armoured, but consistent when a turret is added to an armoured personnel carrier. The sharply angled turret front can only defeat a 12.7mm standard, not armour-piercing (AP), projectile at 100m and a 7.62mm AP projectile at 200m.  The chassis front can stop a 7.62mm AP projectile at 100m, the sides of the vehicle at 200m and the rest of the vehicle is proof against standard ball rounds. Besides the traditional cavalry roles of flank protection, rear area security, and pursuing a defeated enemy, the PLA envisage it using to exploit a break though of enemy defences.

This essentially means that it will operate the same way that our LAV-25 does. How long this vehicle will remain in service is unknown, but it can be expected that the Chinese will soon pass these along to client states so expect US and allied forces to face them on a future battlefield.

Bucket List.

I've got to get up into the Welsh mountains one day and see some high performance aircraft zoom by.  Its on my bucket list for sure!

F-35C CF-5 First Flight

X-47B UCAS Catapult Testing.

Tavor coming to the USA!

The Firearms Blog is reporting that the TAVOR is coming to the USA soon.  Prices have been announced and I'm intrigued. Read about it here.

Modest Proposal. Its time for the USAF to setup its own Direct Action Special Ops Teams.

The USAF is part of SOCOM but its participation is a bit off.  It deploys its units as a whole but then sends out detachments with other units to perform missions.

That should stop and the USAF needs to make the final leap into setting up Direct Action Units.

Why?

Quite simply because operations will dictate it.  Most especially the way that Para-Rescue will be used in the future.  Between Para-Rescue, Combat Controllers and Combat Weathermen the beginnings of a direct action unit are already in place.  Using properly motivated members of the Security Forces would round things out.

But back to Para-Rescue.  The more I read about the future concept of operations...dropping a vehicle out the back of a helo or driving it off at one landing zone....traveling 50 miles or more to pick up the survivor and then continuing on another 50 miles or more to a pick up zone dictates the need for a force of more than 4 para-rescue men.  Quite honestly I could see a need for at least a platoon of men.  At the very least and armed to the teeth at that.

Inter-service cooperation is great.  Inter-service cooperation is awesome.  But getting it in house is great too and the Air Force has the capability.  Its just a matter of getting the will to make it happen.  Besides.  Ask any Security Forces person and they'll tell you that they're more than capable.  Time to prove it.