National Day of Mourning

You have two days to sponge and press your black arm bands.

On January 14, 1985, the Beretta/Mattel handthing was officially adopted by the Bureaucracy in Charge of  Stuff for American Warriors.

It's at a site which should be censored due to a subversive suggestion we kowtowed to European political pressure to adopt their sub-calibre nincompoopery. The very idea!

Meanwhile, the 1911  of John Moses Browning  remains undead. Enough breeding stock graces the hands of the MEUs and other special forces to offer the possibility of repopulation. 

One more (Girls Galore)

A reader from the arid regions has been nagging on the subject, so here's Breda, a librarian with carrying tendencies. 

Librarians are okay. They work in places full of books that give people funny ideas and stuff, but I guess everybody's gotta make a living.

Girl in the Sandbox

Introducing Abby. For you gentleman readers who served in the ranks, she's the noncom you wish you'd had, assuming that you could get over  the notion that uniform skirts should be worn only by those  who typed or gave injections or were looking for Section 8s.

Abby's been dealing with a shortage of 9mm ammo for those toy Berettas our military-industrial complex imposed on our warriors ~ 1985.  The fact assumes extra meaning when it's understood she and her Civil Affairs Unit reside in Iraq, but she's a resourceful female, and I suspect that some feather merchant in supply is about to suffer earburn.

Say, that reminds me, and this is no shit, back in the old days we wouldn't have had none uh them little foreign bullets. Why, that .45 would knock...".

Sorry. Nostalgia happens.

Speaking of a Big Bopper

A guy writing for the Philadelphia Examiner explained why .50 BMGs are among the guns (probably all of them, in his view) that ought to be banned or regulated or something. Among the horrors he noted is that the .50 is "capable of targeting a plane."

It was the journaloid's misfortune to have his piece read by Pilot Jim.

That Jim flies Lears for a living and hardly ever worries about a gun-induced half-inch hole in his bird. Good read.

I give the PhilEx guy a pass on sloppy use of the transitive verb, noting merely that I can and have targeted the occasional Cessna with my unlicensed and unregistered  .91 RIF (Right Index Finger). Probably do 'er again, too.