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Mercutio
Member since May-26-13
942 posts
Oct-09-16, 10:09 PM (EDT)
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"From Russia With Guns"
 
   Today in news of general interest to at least a few people here, we have one item about Russia, two items about guns, and one item about both!

Vladimir Putin either has no sense of history or an extremely, extremely good sense of history. From Politico:

According to the Russian daily Kommersant, a major new reshuffle of Russia’s security agencies is under way that will unite the FSB (the main successor agency to the KGB) with Russia’s foreign intelligence service into a new super-agency called the Ministry of State Security — a report that, significantly, wasn’t denied by the Kremlin or the FSB itself.

The new agency, which revives the name of Stalin’s secret police between 1943 and 1953, will be as large and powerful as the old Soviet KGB, employing as many as 250,000 people.

Caveat: I don't know how good the analysis in that article is; stateside, Politico was dubbed "Tiger Beat on the Potomac" by Charlie Pierce and for damn good reason. I've no idea if their European bureau matches it for shoddiness. But the factual parts of that piece are super well-sourced.

So yeah. Russia has really come full circle since Yeltsin stood on that tank, hasn't it? We're even bringing back Stalinist institutions again, because why the fuck not?

On the same day I read about this, I was trawling through the Cold War tag on tumblr and turned up this curiosity from a blog about historic and antique firearms:

Created by Igor Stechkin in 1955 for KGB Cold War use, the TKB-506 was a pistol designed to be disguised as a cigar or cigarette case. The pistol consisted of three internal barrels, each of which was loaded with a special 7.62 SP-2 cartridge. The 7.62 SP-2 was a cartridge based off of the 7.62x39. However the cartridge featured an internal piston situated up against the base of the bullet. When fired the gunpowder charge pushed the piston forward, expelling the bullet. The advantage of this system over a conventional cartridge was that the piston muffled the sound of the discharge, thus the 7.62 SP-2 was an internally silenced cartridge.

Sometimes it's nice to be reminded that the completely ridiculous shit you saw in Bond films and on Get Smart wasn't really all that much of a stretch, although in real life the design compromises probably gave a lot of engineers hives.

In the vein of firearms... it's never been a Gun of the Week, but anyone who knows about firearms to recognize the name "John Browning" will probably know about one of the most successful of his many successful designs, the Colt M1911. The profile is instantly recognizable to anyone who has seen just about any old war movies, or frankly any media involving sidearms produced over about a fifty-year period.

The M1911 was dropped as the standard-issue sidearm for most of the armed forces in 1911, but hung on in some specialized roles. However, the last part of the US armed services to issue the M1911, the Marine Special Operations Command (MARSOC), has stopped doing so. From the Marine Times:

For Marine special operators, the never-ending debate over whether the 9mm or .45-caliber round is the more powerful bullet has been settled.

Previously, the classic .45-caliber Colt 1911 was one of three pistols that Raiders were allowed to carry, but now the 9mm Glock 19 is the only pistol that Marine special operators can take into battle, said Maj. Nick Mannweiler, a spokesman for Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command.

“We put our money behind the 9mm round fired by an extremely well-trained marksman carrying a Glock 19,” Mannweiler told Marine Corps Times.

The M1911 had a good run in the armed services: 1911 to 2016. That's a hell of a service life.

Finally, bringing up the rear... how many people here have ever heard of the National Tracing Center?

You in the back, with your hand up? You're a damn liar, sir, but god help me I love you for it.

The National Tracing Center are the men and women (mostly and overwhelmingly women, in fact) who, at the request of local, state, federal, and international law enforcement, trace the source of firearms used in connection with crimes.

Sounds simple, right?

“People don't think,” (ATF Agent Charlie Houser) tells me. He's a trim guy, 51, full lips and a thin goatee, and he likes to wear three-piece suits. They fit loose, so the overall effect is awkward innocence, like an eighth grader headed to his first formal. “ I get e-mails even from police saying, ‘Can you type in the serial number and tell me who the gun is registered to?’ Every week. They think it's like a VIN number on a car. Even police. Police from everywhere. ‘Hey, can you guys hurry up and type that number in?’ ”

You should read the entire article, because it is fascinating. The TLDR version, though: because we can't have nice things, the US government is not permitted to computerize firearms records or develop a method by which to search said records automatically in any way, shape, for form. These searches must be done by hand, by people. Overworked and underpaid people, on a shoestring budget.

These people are goddamn geniuses.

That cop with the gun dangling from his pinkie. He dials the tracing center and describes the gun. This is Step One. Let's say, for example, he reports that he's got a 9-mm semi-automatic Beretta 92.

This would seem to be a straightforward matter. It's not. Cops are bad at describing guns. This is because many guns look alike and the nuances can be fantastically minute and critical to a successful trace.

“You don't think of Egypt making pistols, but they make a knockoff of the Beretta,” ATF specialist Scott Hester tells me.

... He's holding a hefty book, one of his favorite gun encyclopedias, and he would like to tell me about the Beretta 92 and its various doppelgängers. “Now, the real Beretta's made in Italy,” he says, “but Taurus is made in Brazil. So you have the Beretta 92 and Taurus PT 92. They're the exact same gun except the safety's on the slide on one and on the frame of the other.” I want to tell him it doesn't matter—I was just picking any random gun so he could walk me through the steps about how to trace it—but it occurs to me that his entire career is built on the premise that, yes, it matters. “Now, Beretta was licensing its stuff in Brazil,” he goes on, “but Taurus bought it out, so they bought up Brazil—Beretta's factory in Brazil—and licensed it as Taurus.” He's pointing to a page in the book, tapping hard as if the force of the tap will make this any easier to follow.

“Now, they're almost identical guns,” he says proudly, like a math professor who just reached the most obviously correct answer, “but from different parts of the planet!”

Read the whole thing. For reals. Apparently, GQ does reporting now, actual reporting. Who knew?

-Merc
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  Subject     Author     Message Date     ID  
  RE: From Russia With Guns Gryphonadmin Oct-09-16 1
     RE: From Russia With Guns Mercutio Oct-10-16 4
         RE: From Russia With Guns Gryphonadmin Oct-10-16 5
  RE: From Russia With Guns VoidRandom Oct-10-16 2
     RE: From Russia With Guns StClair Oct-13-16 6
         RE: From Russia With Guns Mercutio Oct-13-16 7
  RE: From Russia With Guns MoonEyes Oct-10-16 3

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Gryphonadmin
Charter Member
22375 posts
Oct-09-16, 10:40 PM (EDT)
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1. "RE: From Russia With Guns"
In response to message #0
 
   Couple of quick takes:

1) Yeah. He's even calling it the MGB again! Which will annoy Russia's collectors of classic British sports cars, I'm sure.

2) The M1911(A1) has never been the Gun of the Week because—believe it or not—I don't have one. The decent ones are fairly expensive, and I've never gotten around to it.

3) I might've mentioned this before, but I once toyed with the idea of becoming a firearms-and-toolmark examiner. Unfortunately, at the time (and possibly still, I haven't kept up), you had to be a uniformed officer of the Maine State Police to hold that particular job at the state crime lab. It's not quite the same thing, but I was reminded.

Also, here is a video of a talk on proof marks and firearms identification Ian from Forgotten Weapons gave a couple years ago.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Mercutio
Member since May-26-13
942 posts
Oct-10-16, 02:14 PM (EDT)
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4. "RE: From Russia With Guns"
In response to message #1
 
  
>3) I might've mentioned this before, but I once toyed with the idea of
>becoming a firearms-and-toolmark examiner.

You hadn't, at least not to me. Seems like your sort of job; detail-oriented, rewards intense knowledge of minutia and trivia, but also involves working with your hands.

>Also, here is a video of a talk on proof
>marks and firearms identification Ian from Forgotten Weapons gave a
>couple years ago.

My YouTube suggested videos are gonna be so weird after having watched this. "Hello, monetizable eyeball! I see you like RWBY! And... My Little Pony. And Civilization VI Let's Plays. And a three-hour lecture about firearms. And a bunch of fisks of RT propaganda newscasts."

The best part of it is how relentlessly normal it all is. They might as well be discussing any other mass-produced item with a lot of discrete parts and international traffic in it, like cars, or electronics. Nobody in that video is going to go home and fellate their AR-15; they're going to go home and carefully examine their barrel shanks with a jeweler's loupe to see if their Lee-Enfield or Mosin was manufactured anywhere interesting or weird. ("Wait, this thing was in ISRAEL at some point? What the hell, I bought it in Dubuque. How does that even happen?")

I like that.

-Merc
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Gryphonadmin
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22375 posts
Oct-10-16, 02:40 PM (EDT)
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5. "RE: From Russia With Guns"
In response to message #4
 
   >My YouTube suggested videos are gonna be so weird after having
>watched this. "Hello, monetizable eyeball! I see you like RWBY! And...
>My Little Pony. And Civilization VI Let's Plays. And a three-hour
>lecture about firearms. And a bunch of fisks of RT propaganda
>newscasts."

The YT recs accompanying Ian's videos are often pretty insane anyway, because he tags his videos as "educational" and so YT often pairs them up with, for instance, "learn your ABCs" videos and "teaching kids about colors" and that kind of thing.

>The best part of it is how relentlessly normal it all is. They
>might as well be discussing any other mass-produced item with a lot of
>discrete parts and international traffic in it, like cars, or
>electronics.

Yup. Professionals being professional. It's a counterpoint to the good ol' boy/gun-brah culture that doesn't get enough exposure.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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VoidRandom
Member since Dec-9-02
181 posts
Oct-10-16, 03:42 AM (EDT)
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2. "RE: From Russia With Guns"
In response to message #0
 
   Knowing about Putin, I'll go with "extremely, extremely good sense of history".

-VR
I have been listening to the audiobook of "The Great Terror" by Robert Conquest. Reccommended, but not before bed.
"They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind,
And I left 'em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind."


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StClair
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831 posts
Oct-13-16, 04:11 AM (EDT)
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6. "RE: From Russia With Guns"
In response to message #2
 
   LAST EDITED ON Oct-13-16 AT 04:12 AM (EDT)
 
Same.

I know that remakes and reboots of things from your childhood are all the thing lately, but I could have done without the Cold War being one of them.


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Mercutio
Member since May-26-13
942 posts
Oct-13-16, 02:57 PM (EDT)
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7. "RE: From Russia With Guns"
In response to message #6
 
   It's not really as bad as all that.

I mean... Russia does have nuclear weapons. (We think. The degree to which their arsenal of ICBMs might or not actually still be usable is up for debate, but we have to act like they do at any rate.) This means we have to take them more seriously than we otherwise would.

But the thing is... that's rising from a low floor. Russia has an economy about the size of Italy, is a dysfunctional kleptocracy, is hemmed in on all sides either by NATO or the Chinese, and to the extent their military is still "competitive" in the modern sense it is because they spend money they do not have on expensive toys they cannot ever afford to lose.

They have also lost a lot of overseas muscle as they're no longer willing to pour resources into postage-stamp sized nations half a world away as part of some grand ideological struggle. (The Soviet bloc was massively unusual among empires, historically speaking, because resources flowed from the center outwards, instead of from the periphery inward.)

Russia is dangerous to its periphery states that aren't part of a larger defensive alliance. I bet Estonia and Latvia are REALLY GLAD they got into NATO when the getting was good, otherwise what is happening to the Ukraine would have already happened to them.

But the days when we had to worry about T-72s rolling en masse through the Fulda Gap while the Soviet Air Force meaningfully contested the skies above Europe from NATO are long gone. Russia is, at this point, basically just another regional power that is trying to exercise influence along their immediate borders. This is not ideal, but it isn't some huge calamity either. Putin exercises only a fraction of the power his Soviet predecessors did, and I think we can all agree that's a very, very good thing.

-Merc
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MoonEyes
Member since Jun-29-03
1125 posts
Oct-10-16, 06:45 AM (EDT)
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3. "RE: From Russia With Guns"
In response to message #0
 
   2. Yeah, that gun is rather distinctive. It ALSO had, as I recall, specifically shaped grooves in the (very) short barrel, so that the round, which was the same as used in the venerable AK(M/47) also had the same striations as the rifle in question, thus making any remains seem as if they'd been fired from 200 meters away from an assault rifle, rather than 5 feet from an, essentially absolutely quiet, assassination gun.

Because not only do we have a gun that is so James Bond that no-one would ever suspect it...but IF they suspect it, we throw them off by making them think it was an AK instead!

...!
Gott's Leetle Feesh in Trousers!


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