Idiot Gun Driver of the Day. Tanks are apparently hard to drive. A collector in Oregon purchased a 1969 Chieftain battle tank, and it was to be delivered. However, when the delivery truck driver got there, he found he couldn’t make it up the last hill. So, he unloaded the tank on the side of the road, and an employee of the buyer decided to try and drive the tank up the hill. Hey, he had the manual. He failed. Twice. The tank slipped out of gear, rolled back down the hill, across the highway, and through a guardrail. So he tried again, with the same result, but through a different guardrail. The driver was cited for reckless driving and first-degree criminal mischief. The guardrails sustained $1500 damage. The tank, being a tank, was unscathed.
The Virginia Citizens Defense League included a reminder in their Monday update that Delaware no longer honors Virginia Concealed Handgun Permits. Delaware does still honor both Utah and Florida nonresident permits, however, and both of those states have options available to Old Dominion residents. Utah concealed permit information can be found here and Florida concealed permit information can be found here.
This is gun-related, I promise. OK, maybe not now, but given enough time, I think it will be. In case you hadn’t heard, Amazon.com is planning on trying a program of delivery drones. The drone-based delivery service will be called Prime Air, and would be able to get customers their merchandise within 30 minutes of pressing the “Buy” button. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos gave 60 minutes an “optimistic estimate” of 4-5 years until the service is available. Check out the rest of the story, with video, over at HuffPo. (Sorry)
A couple weeks back, NRA president James W. Porter II wrote an editorial for The Daily Caller about soon-to-be-not-anymore-Mayor Mike Bloomberg, and his all-consuming anti-freedom agenda. When asked about his commitment to gun control, Mayor Mike said “I put $600 million of my own money into trying to stop the tobacco companies … That’s one issue. Who knows with this?” Porter opines “Bloomberg’s comparison of the Second Amendment to smoking totally gave his game away. What he really believes is that our culture of freedom is harmful to us and should be liquidated a step at a time.” My question is, does Bloomberg still matter? When he leaves office in just a few short weeks, will his star (and his influence) be dimmed, once he’s no longer the mayor of The City That Never Sleeps, as Giuliani said, The Capital of the World? Or will he continue to remain front and center in the fight against liberty?
M.D. Creekmore over at survivalistblog.com has written an article titled Warning: Do You Recognize these Five Common Piles of Prepper BS in which he debunks some common things you hear around the prepper, surivivalist, and even gun-owning communities, such as “the golden horde” and “without rule of law.” It’s a quick, interesting read.
Primary Weapons Systems, the folks that brought us the Tactical Forearm Lengthener, have decided they want, as they put it, “a taste of that sweet reality TV show pie.” However, realizing they were “horrendous man-beasts,” they decided to make it animated. You can read the rest of the (short) story at the link above, and their “promo” video is below. They’ve been pretty entertaining this far, so I have high hopes.
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Tom in Oregon has all sorts of neat toys. I wouldn’t put it past him to have a tank. I gotta wait 10 days for a shotgun and in Oregon they just drop tanks on the side of the road.
As for kapo bloomberg. As long as he’s got millions to spend he’ll matter. Maybe we’ll get lucky and some greedy relative will have him declared incompetent and take control of his affairs. Or just knock him off for the inheritence. Either way we win.
Didn’t you hear? They gave Tom an MRAP as a gift when he retired from the force. I mean, they’ve just got the things laying around.
Ha!
I wish. I got to keep my ID card so I can access the building and my shield.
Even had to turn in my G-17 cause the next guy needed it.
But we can all agree that Oregon is better than California. And Washington is better than Oregon.
…and .40 is better than all.
Florida. I meant Florida, not .40
@Matt: Freudian slip. Where you mean one thing and say a mother.
.40 is better….especially when you add .05….
jwm,
100 points for using “kapo” to refer to Bloomberg! Brilliant!
“When he leaves office in just a few short weeks, will his star (and his influence) be dimmed, once he’s no longer the mayor of The City That Never Sleeps, as Giuliani said, The Capital of the World? Or will he continue to remain front and center in the fight against liberty?”
No, he will be in the background, using his money and influence to prop up other disarmament-minded tyrants, and he’ll be able to do so without attaching his well-known and politically toxic name and agenda to them. He’ll be even more insidious when people don’t see him anymore.
I hope bloomturd just quietly goes away. And we read his obit in a few months after he does a David Carridine. After which we learn he left his money to a cat shelter.
Bloomy NOT being front and center is what worries me. He can do a lot more damage from behind the curtain where we can’t see him.
Oh, and wow. Just wow…
“I AM THE GREAT AND POWERFUL OZ – pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”.
When you shine the light on them the roaches scurry away. When it’s dark…
There may be hope – apparently Bloomie really LOVES London, to the point where he bought a block there and is developing it into “Bloomberg Place” (NYTimes article on 2-8-2013). With any luck, he will move to the land of hope, glory, and insane gun control laws and spend the rest of his life griping about the armed savages in America – and investing his money into British politics.
If someone shoots down my box of Magpul stuff from Amazon, I’m gonna hafta choke a bitch.
I recently read an article (popped up on Google news, don’t recall the source) that made a pretty strong case that the Amazon Drone thing was nothing more than a brilliant ploy to get a million bucks worth of free name recognition advertising for Amazon in the middle of the Xmas shopping season. The writer pointed out that everything about it went against Amazon’s “hub and spokes” business plan. Then he outlined the air traffic issues, problems with deliveries in cities heavy in multi-family dwellings, the likely future range limitations of any drone capable of operating at a realistic cost, bandwidth issues in trying to operate whole fleets of the things simultaneously (not to mention the sort of problem solving abilities that would need to be built into each unit if you aren’t going to have a separate operator for each drone), and a host of other intractable problems. His final take was that it would never be practical, except in rural areas within a limited radius of the hub warehouses.
Jeff Bezos is a lot of things, but he isn’t stupid.
He’s running a company with $14B annual sales at a loss, and the stock price keeps climbing….I’d say he’s doing something right….
A million bucks worth of free advertising is NOT a stupid idea.
He didn’t say it was, Leadbelly. >:)
I haven’t research his background, so maybe he is an expert, but in all of Creekmore’s points he seems rather derisive of “self proclaimed survivalist.” What makes him any different? Not saying that I don’t agree with most of what he said, but what makes him less self proclaimed than the rest?
RE Creekmore’s article:
http://shtfschool.com/violence/types-of-real-survivalists-1/
There’s a lot more at his site, And worse, too.
I don’t understand. The section you quoted wasn’t on the page you linked. Are you implying that Creekmore wrote that?
It does seem consistent with his vernacular. I think that it was just the wrong link. There’s some good reading at that site though. Very down to earth.
No. The link should have been http://shtfschool.com/violence/being-in-a-city-under-siege/
The only point was that Selco has experience to go with his theory.
Thanks, I’m going to poke around that site a little later.
What does a civil war in Bosnia have to do with an economic collapse in the U.S. – which is what Mr. Creekmore was talking about in his article – http://www.thesurvivalistblog.net/break-free-with-reality-five-common-piles-of-prepper-bs/
anyone who can put $600 million towards something matters.
But the open question is, after he no longer has a political dog in the fight, how much of his money is he willing to spend on a political pipe-dream? He may be wealthy, but is he that much of an ideologue?
Once Bloomberg is out of the political limelight associated with his high profile office as Mayor of New York, he becomes more of a threat.
He and his ‘associates’ can work surreptitiously under the radar and his nickname “Capo” along with his money and contacts will make him more of a threat than ever.
Bet he didn’t need a CLEO to sign off on that tank purchase
I have been spending WAY too much time here. Your comment suddenly made me think “I need to build a tank silencer…..”
That’s simply because, you do need to build a tank silencer!
It’s not a tank, but I give you the Rheinmetall Corporation artillery silencer.
http://www.guns.com/2013/02/05/the-tank-silencer-4-photos/
Damnit matt get out of my brain! Immediately the first thing that popped up
Since we sell counterbattery radar systems to Germany (thus eliminating any tactical value), and since all their training areas have been in use since WW2 – I’m not sure what the point is.
Are the folks near Grafenwohr and Hohensfels complaining about noise now?
I’m going to need a bigger oil can…..
Guilty of one count of being a tank, and one count of being an accessory to being a tank
In all honesty, if you buy a tank you might want to have it checked out before driven. Sounds like the thing has some transmission/clutch issues it should not just “slip out of gear”
Not necessarily, they aren’t unstoppable and they won’t negotiate grades above a maximum published in the technical manual. The hardest thing about driving a tracked armored vehicle is learning how to steer with the transmission instead of a set of wheels.
New drivers high center them, flip them, throw track trying to pivot steer on gravel or sand, drive into fighting positions that haven’t been properly filled, etc. Happens all the time.
I’m putting my money on a bad injector pump which also would have been found if the guy had checked out the tank. The engine will lose power when put under a load such as trying to go up a hill. If the upper part of the pump is really bad then the engine will die just trying to move.
BTW When Arnold Schwarzenegger was drafted into the Austrian Army he was an M-48 Tank Driver.
Half cocked. Archer meets the office?
We shall see.
Somehow I don’t think they’ll have ::Danger Zone::
Seriously, Matt. Call Kenny Loggins.
my thoughts exactly
I had to read the title of that video a few times before I realized it doesn’t say “Half Cocked Porno.”
Robbers, thieves, rapists and murders will seek out isolated retreats, because of there isolation
——————————-
The logic there is as a bad as the grammar.
Seeking out something isolated means you have to have some idea that it exists. It’s simply not cost effective for people to spend days going down dirt roads in the hope there is something there to loot.
Living off a freeway with your nearest neighbor a mile away isn’t being remote. People driving by know where you live.
Remote is the end of a three mile dirt road with 15 dead ends on the route, and the entrance to that dirt road is 10 miles to the nearest town with a population over 100, and there are dozens of such old logging entrances.
Unless you’ve been there before, you’re not going to find the place.
Check out a guy named Ferfal. He posted a lot online about the problems in Argentina during their economic collapse. Isolated farm families were home invaded and violated. Your retreat in the woods is no where as big a secret as you think. We live in the info age.
Small towns are best. People can work together to make life passable for all.
“Most of the supposed “hordes” will die in place waiting on the government to come in and rescue them.”
Truer words have never been spoken.
Persons in love with the sound of their own voce make poor prophets; what happened in in Bosnia is not the blue print for what will happen in the US, though many of the same forces will be in play. already the citizens along the east and west coastlines are being disarmed while the cartels and gangs grow ever stronger, encouraged by the current Riech.
The autho is elcomeO HIS UNICORNS, I’ll stay with my defensive position
“The tank, being a tank, was unscathed”
I have found my quotable quote of the day 😀
You’d be surprised how easy it is to break a tank. I believe the record is 5 days from the time it was unloaded new from the factory and the day it was loaded back on the train car for a complete rebuild. No rollovers involved. Never underestimate the power of an idiot.
BTW when the soviets invaded afghanistan they had to pull all over their T-80 Tanks back out within a few months and replace them with T-54/55’s and 62’s. The T-80s counldnt handle the rough terrain.
A very entertaining cartoon that I saw recently is The Damn Few from RangerUp.com
http://rhinoden.rangerup.com/category/video/the-damn-few/
They have some awesome shirts also, one of the ones I got here – http://www.rangerup.com/betamerica.html
The production value is kind of rough in the first few episodes, but the gun control episode is EPIC!!!!!!!! and like almost 30m long.
That PWS cartoon really does have an archer feel to it, could be funny, the darth vader accessories set cracked me up hard.
They aren’t called drones they are called UAVs or UASs. Calling it a drone puts you in the same place as the people that call magazines clips.
Bezos says in the video, “These are octocopters, effectively drones…”
Face it, the words are becoming (are already) basically interchangeable for 90% of the world at this point.
Got to drive an M-113 APC in infantry training at Ft. Benning. DANG, was that fun – you would be surprised how big a tree you can run over – up to 4-5″ diameter, at least, without high-centering it or denting anything too much. Note: Keep your head below the driver’s or commander’s turret hatch when the tree comes down on top of the APC, and try not to let it land on the Ma Deuce.
For some reason, they never let me drive a tank. The one I really wanted to try was the Engineer Combat Demolition Vehicle: M-60 tank with a dozer/cutter blade up front, and a 152mm demolition gun on the turret. They didn’t let us play with any C-4 or det cord, either.