Silicon Valley Redneck

Hm. The misreporting was worse than it seemed.

Details here.

The story that was making the rounds yesterday, wherein a purported journalist described in detail his experiences in visiting a gun shop and firing an AR-15, was obviously bogus in many respects.  Smell of sulfur?  Really?  And, while it's been a couple of decades since I fired one of those things, I'm quite certain that the recoil of an AR-15 won't bruise your shoulder no matter how wrongly you hold it.  Seriously.  The effective recoil is practically in Daisy BB gun territory.  His terrifying account was clearly fantasy.

Well, it turns out he was lying about pretty much every other aspect of his visit to the gun shop, too.

Flashback.  Early 1990s.  One of the columnists for the San Jose Mercury News told of his experience with a group of local shooters.  They took him somewhere out in the hills to shoot at a variety of targets, including balls of aluminum foil tossed in the air to be shot at with rifles.  When he asked where the bullets were ending up, the guys gave him a blank look.

On the BBS (this was the pre-Internet days) a couple of days later: an account of the same outing as told by one of the shooters.  Basically, everything after "some guys took me shooting last week" was a lie.  They had in fact taken him to the Los Altos Rod and Gun Club, where there's a range staff, and they're very particular about safety; the shenanigans he described would definitely not have been tolerated there.

When contacted for an explanation of where this bizarre fantasy account had come from, he explained that he'd initially written it up just as it had happened... but the editors had made him change it.  Because the honest account didn't fit the paper's official perspective.

 

In other news, more young people now get their news from social media than from TV.  This, presumably, is meant to be a Bad Thing.  But, given that newspaper news has been wildly inaccurate (even when not outright dishonest) for decades, and TV news is even worse... maybe this is an improvement?  At least there isn't a cartel controlling the content, no matter how hard Facebook and Twitter may try.

Permissive action links

Once again, some team of super-geniuses has come up with a grand plan for smart guns, while having no idea of how guns work and why.

The latest, it seems, it that guns shall have embedded electronics that enable firing only if they receive a correctly-coded authorization signal via WiFi.

The code would have to match the uses for which the gun is authorized: personal defense, hunting, Secret Service only, and so on.

This is meant to prevent mass shootings or some such.

How many ways can this go wrong?  I mean, apart from dead batteries, and the possibility that someone who's actually seen the innards of a gun will figure out how to bypass the whole electronic mess?

Well, let's take hunting, for example.  How's the WiFi coverage for the entire state of Montana?

Or personal defense.  Applies at home, right?  So your home has to have the WiFi beacon to authorize your gun to fire there.

So what's to keep someone from sniffing the authorization packets for his home-defense gun, and broadcasting a counterfeit edition from his cellphone's WiFi?  Or just carrying his home beacon with him?

Or consider a special secure only-government-guns-work-here zone.  What's to keep someone from jamming the beacon, so none of the authorized guns work anymore, strapping on a brace of 1875-vintage revolvers and a couple of bandoleers of .45LC, and going on a shooting spree?

The whole thing makes so much negative sense... well, this is what happens when Smart People inhabit a total bubble and believe that everything they need to know is contained within that bubble.

I'm reminded of my days at a small business-software company, and the copy-protection schemes we came up with.  Many of them would have worked most excellently, if only we'd been able to install special hardware on all the unauthorized computers.

A warped barrel is a fool's frustration

With regard to a DIY Krummlauf, Pinky asks: "How illegal is this?"

Wrong question, dude.  You're in California.  The question is: "A wacky cartoon gun having been shown on TV, how long until there's a new law against it?"

And then... Vera needs oxygen around her?  Naw.  Results as expected.  But they left out a possibility: depending how the gun is lubricated, what various parts are made of, and how long it's left in vacuum, it might just seize up.

This epically stupid idea went to market...

Kyle Mizokami explains some of the dumbness of a spiffy new smart gun.

But there's another thing....

See, the gun is meant to be enabled by a special watch.  Mizokami notes:

There’s another issue unique to the smart gun. It’s practically begging for hackers to attack it. Armatrix claims its system is encrypted. That doesn’t mean that someone can’t hack your firearm—it just means it won’t be easy.

And how would you know if your gun had been hacked? You wouldn’t—until you drew the weapon for self-defense and it failed to work.

Actually, disabling it doesn't require hacking.  Just jamming.  Interfere with the radio link between watch and gun, and the gun becomes useless.  And, a radio link with a 10-inch range?  Can't be using much power, so it doesn't take much power to prevent it working.

Giggle alert!

Via the comments at Tam's comes - set down your beverage before clicking - a most excellent report of Mikhail Kalashnikov's recent demise.

Attention to detail

I can't help thinking there's something wrong with this picture.

Srsly?

Oh, look: another misplaced decimal point!

Spotted here:

They mounted a main battery of five dual-purpose 5-inch, .38 caliber guns

I said that was an ambiguous phrase, didn't I?

New! Proprietary! Uh...

Randomly following links, I encounter this phrase:

the full-size and compact models feature a new proprietary rotating barrel breech to provide lockup

Hmmm.  Rotating barrel lockup.  Colt, 2000?  Steyr, 1912?  Savage, 1907?

And I assume the name of the product, Px4, is pronounced "Pee-by-four."  Right?  Or did no one in Marketing run it by any 'Murricans?

Silly caption error

CDR Salamander is having a caption contest.

The official caption includes this bit:

Sailors clean the MK-45 5-inch/.54-caliber lightweight gun

Er.  Misplaced decimal point?  A 5-inch, .54-caliber gun would be a large-bore pistol with a 5" long barrel.  What they're cleaning appears to be more of an artillery piece with a 5"×54 = 270" long barrel.

The classic example of this ambiguous terminology is of course the five-inch, thirty-eight-caliber gun, which, as spoken, could reasonably be parsed either way.

In the days of lace-ruffles, perukes, and brocade...

Quoth Iain Thomson in El Reg:

But the Sandia system is unusual in that it relies on a smooth bore barrel to fire the projectile, rather than the rifled guns used for the last few hundred years

Er... last few hundred?  This from a Brit?  (A Brit reporting from San Francisco, but still.)  History, man, history!

 

Pigs 9; British bipeds 4.

Late lunch hour was time to watch some Mythbusters; today, the "tossing pigs out of helicopters" edition.

As is often the case, I'm bothered by their treatment of the main myth: "It's sometimes possible to dodge a bullet fired at a distance" somehow morphed into "It's sometimes possible to dodge a bullet fired at a distance from a modern sniper rifle."

The results might have been very different if they'd used a different bullet-flanger.  A Trapdoor Springfield, say, or Brown Bess, or even a .44 Magnum with a high-muzzle-flash load, rather than the latest high-velocity, low-signature technology.

And you'd think, after the pig toss, they'd have headed off into the sunset talking about making sausage....