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This week’s best caption writer will win a pair of Smith & Wesson M&P Performance Earmuffs courtesy Smith & Wesson. Enter your caption in the comments by midnight Sunday. We’ll announce a winner on Monday.

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131 COMMENTS

  1. There’s a new sheriff in town and he doesn’t give a damn about getting kicked out of school.

  2. Buckingingham Palace is protected be Americans. Six year old Americans. Armed, Six year olds, Americans. It seem unarmed Brit guards can’t cut it.
    But guns kill…

  3. BREAKING NEWS: The British are gobsmacked by free men having firearms and large cahonies as evidenced by the Texas youngster’s deadly arsenal and peculiar gait.

  4. Much to the chagrin of the palace guard, the Sinn Fein had been training circus midgets for a raid on Buckingham palace.

      • Er, no. In 1917 Britain was not at such risk (though France was), and U.S. help arrived too late to make a difference anyway (though, to be fair, everybody thought it would). In 1941 U.S. help was only to defeat the Axis powers, and it turned out that the strings attached hurt Britain so much that there was precious little “saving” anyway.

        • “In 1941 U.S. help was only to defeat the Axis powers, and it turned out that the strings attached hurt Britain so much that there was precious little ‘saving’ anyway.”

          Putting aside the tendency toward chauvinism on both sides of “the pond”, there was a people-to-people program of aid from Yanks to embattled Brits you should not ignore.
          A poster, “rbernie” at thehighroad.org reports:

          British government advertisements in American newspapers and in magazines such as The American Rifleman begged Americans to “Send A Gun to Defend a British HomeÐBritish civilians, faced with threat of invasion. desperately need arms for the defense of their homes.” The ads pleaded for “Pistols, Rifles, Revolvers, Shotguns and Binoculars from American civilians who wish to answer the call and aid in defense of British homes.”
          Pro-Allied organizations in the United States collected weapons; the National Rifle Association shipped 7,000 guns to Britain. Britain also purchased surplus World War I Enfield rifles from America’s Department of War.
          Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s book “Their Finest Hour” details the arrival of shipments of .300 caliber rifles and .75 caliber artillery pieces from the U.S. government in July 1940. Churchill personally supervised the deliveries to ensure that they were sent on fast ships and distributed first to Home Guard members in coastal zones. Churchill thought that the American donations were “entirely on a different level from anything we have transported across the Atlantic except for the Canadian division itself.” Churchill warned his First Lord that “the loss of these rifles and field-guns would be a disaster of the first order.”
          “When the ships from America approached our shores with their priceless arms special trains were waiting in all the ports to receive their cargoes,” Churchill recalled. “The Home Guard in every county, in every town, in every village, sat up all through the night to receive them…. By the end of July we were an armed nation…. a lot of our men and some women had weapons in their hands.

          BTW I understand the man Churchill put in charge of the Lend-lease ships from the USA was rewarded for his excellent service to the Crown by being made a Viscount. I would assume there was some value to the Empire in the Lend-lease program evidenced by that action.

        • LongPurple, first of all, I want to thank you for a reasoned reply based on accurate data, rather than the “my country, right or wrong” sort based on falsified material that has been long debunked elsewhere. You are certainly right about the behaviour of U.S. people, but the other sorts of comments were lumping the whole lot together, government and all, and the U.S.A. as such certainly behaved very badly, taken as a whole.

          The thing is, your material is seriously incomplete, no doubt because that is all the U.S.A. ever tells you. There were lots of U.S. strings attached, they simply weren’t attaced to Lend-Lease itself but to less visible, lower profile things. The U.S.A. made sure to run down all British assets in fire sales for its own benefit before ever doing any Lend-Lease (e.g. many textiles firms), then it took over much technology during the war rather than simply using it and letting it go back (e.g. penicillin mass production was kept despite the R&D and patents being obvious developments, and Canada was barred from getting its shared R&D in nuclear technology and had to start its own CANDU reactor work almost from scratch), and then finally Bretton Woods and post-war rebuilding had lots of strong-armed pro-U.S. strings and financing benefits (much of this is covered by Skidelsky’s biography of Keynes; we know separately that Holland was even coerced into giving up the East Indies by all this, it had been set back so much by the war). All in all, the U.S.A. made sure that Britain and much of Europe were pushed well under rather than allowing them to share the burdens more equally and equitably.

    • You should look up your history better. 1776-83 took a lot of French and Spanish assistance and still left Britain with a lot of what it had had, making it at most a technical knock out, and 1812-14 was a loss on points for the U.S.A.

        • Now its the turn of The British to help The Americans with their foolish adventures in the Middle East.

      • So P.M.L. It sounds like rationalizing; a win is still a win. We were our own country; we were no longer under control by Britain. That is more than a “TKO”. Especially when we won as a frontier society against one of the greatest military powers of the time.

        The war of 1812 was started by us because of the trade embargo by Britain on the US in trade with France, the impressment of American citizens into British naval service and the supply of weapons to the American Indians on the western frontier in trying to create an independent Indian Nation that led to indian raids against the people on the frontier.

        All of that stopped as part of the treaty that ended the war. I’d call that a win. So how did we lose by “Points”?

        • So P.M.L. It sounds like rationalizing; a win is still a win. We were our own country; we were no longer under control by Britain. That is more than a “TKO”.

          What you’re leaving out is what you did not get, that you were after: Canada and Florida. Also, Britain kept a lot of what France and Spain were after, too. It was a three way thing, and Britain’s losses were not simply the opposite of U.S. gains (if anything, France was the biggest loser overall, as it didn’t make any material conquests and the war’s costs made that a Pyrrhic Victory).

          Especially when we won as a frontier society against one of the greatest military powers of the time.

          Except that wasn’t what happened, was it? It was a frontier society allied with’t one of the greatest military powers of the time (France) and one of the middle ranking ones (Spain), against one of the weaker ones. Britain had one of the weakest armies of the time, though of high quality for the period, and made up for that with a strong navy and finances that were used to support allies (which weren’t very available that time; even the Dutch reneged on their treaty obligation to release the Scottish mercenaries they had hired). This was for reasons of cost, different strategic needs as an island, and to reduce the constitutional threat of a large army.

          The war of 1812 was started by us because of the trade embargo by Britain on the US in trade with France, the impressment of American citizens into British naval service and the supply of weapons to the American Indians on the western frontier in trying to create an independent Indian Nation that led to indian raids against the people on the frontier.

          All of that stopped as part of the treaty that ended the war. I’d call that a win. So how did we lose by “Points”?

          Because – again – you didn’t get Canada the way you wanted (which was another motive for attacking that you didn’t mention), and because not one of the U.S. war aims was achieved by that war; those that were, were all achieved by the ending of the Napoleonic Wars and by the 1814 treaty’s resolution of the outstanding British grievances against the U.S.A. (which hadn’t delivered on its 1783 treaty’s commitments, particularly but not only with regard to Loyalists – to be “fair”, it welched on its obligations to France, too). When Britain stopped impressing sailors across the board with Napoleon’s (apparent) defeat in 1814, it had no more need to impress American ones either. While Britain still had a need, it had a right to do so to Americans unless and until the U.S.A. fulfilled its own treaty obligations, just as it had a right to maintain military posts in U.S. territory until then (that was how it worked; Britain didn’t have to deliver until the U.S.A. did, which only happened for the later treaty). So the fact that a later treaty, that the U.S.A. did honour, superseded the earlier treaty in those matters is connected to those two changes, not to the war the U.S.A. launched at all. It all works out as a loss on points since the U.S.A. achieved none of its original war aims through fighting, but only through unrelated changes in the wider world and through negotiating new arrangements that it did, finally, honour.

  5. Silly child! Your teeny hat forces you to have to open carry, while my hat allows me to conceal a full-size pistol, an uzi, a tea pot, my lunch sack, my dog Mr. Winkles, and a saber.

  6. You go “Bang Bang” one more time kid, and I’m gonna put this hat all the way down over your whole body, and we’ll see how much shooting you will do then!

  7. yes I believe in gun rights our forefathers gave us that right we are law abiding citizeneven if there was guncontrol criminals would have guns when we didn’t have right to

  8. What the Beefeater is thinking? Damn, it’s good to be an American! Or, if I wasn’t working for a queen, I could have one of those.

  9. You see sir? It’s called a “six shoo…ter.” Now pay attention and try to keep up. It’s also called a piss…tull. You hold it like this and point it at bad guys. You should take notes, woulda helped you guys back in the war.

  10. To everyone, I am 95% sure those kids are actually British. So yeah.
    The england vs america comments are funny but don’t really work with the picture.

  11. Unconcerned to the point of contempt, our young freedom fighter turns his back on the ridiculously emasculated symbol of our former oppression and focuses the attentions of his trusty peacemaker on the true threat to liberty; the news media.

  12. While Corporal Blythe Swingate seems to be slightly annoyed by the young American Timmy Torkelsons antics, he also seems to be contemplating the superiority of:
    The right to bear arms
    vs
    The right to bear hats

  13. Due to increasing attacks from children high on high fructose corn syrup the Buckingham Palace guards have formed a new unit armed with cap pistols and a vast knowledge of how cops & robbers works to defend the traditional guards from vandalism.

  14. I’ll see your cap gun and raise you one Beefeater.

    Never bring a guy with a big furry hat to a gun fight.

    You may be bigger than me but my friend’s a more snappy dresser.

  15. “No Dad, I want to take the Queen PRISONER!! Her guards don’t have no guns.”
    (Brother:) “He’s right BEHIND YOU!!”
    (Dad:) Scarpers before the rozzers arrive.

  16. That awkward moment when you realize that a 5-year-old can do a better job than you at your chosen career path…

  17. Caption:

    “I can’t’ move but I hope this emu falls off my head and flattens the baby Lone Ranger here!”

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