Posted on 04/23/2007 3:33:57 PM PDT by amchugh
NAHANT - The Nahant Public Library wants to sell one of its most valuable possessions: a German machine gun captured by Army Sgt. Alvin C. York during World War I.
(Excerpt) Read more at itemlive.com ...
Apparently, the ATF is recommending that the gun be destroyed, and the legislative route is the only way to save it.
I’d say it belongs in the Smithsonian, except that it appears that the PC types who run that institution probably want to destroy it too.
Yet one more reason Sgt. York’s probably spinning in his grave.
Sgt. York is one of America’s greatest heroes. Every time I think the FBI and the ATF can’t get any stupider, I am proved wrong.
Shouldn’t the Smithsonian buy it? Or are they now too damned politically correct?
The only answer is to donate it to the Smithsonian, but that won’t raise any money for the library.
The evil twits strike again. I honestly wonder what sort of people join the BATF.
Piss on the ATF.
Hopefully there is some way that the Federal Government can purchase this historic weapon and house it at the Smithsonian or at the Aberdeen Ordnance Museum. To allow a weapon of this immense historical significance to be destroyed is unacceptable.
I think the BATF should be disbanded and its former members barred from government employment.
Donate it to West Point if the Smithsonian doesn’t want to do it justice.
You do and they're liable to blow your head off.
They've murdered women and children for a whole lot less.
I can understand the need for money, but the ATF is out of line. This gun is part of our national heritage. What has happened to my country?
Leave it to ATF not to realize the Smithsonian has a fine weapons collection. So does the Army. Why can’t it be donated? Or is the library really out to make a “killing” at an auction???
IMO The best place would be the Aberdeen Proving Ground Ordnance Museum.
The director, Dr. William Atwater, has stated:
"It is our moral and legal responsibility to preserve military assets,"
I agree with the destruction of the ATF.
Good grief---notify the NRA. I'm sure they would LOVE to have it in their firearms museum in Washington. I'd even bet they could find a sugar-daddy donor who would foot the bill.
And the BATFE wants to DESTROY this historical piece. What numbskulls.
The ATF and DEA need to be shut down. I can probably think of a few other alphabet soup agencies, but those two first come to mind.
No amount of money would suffice unless either (1) Congress amends the NFA to allow the transfer, or (2) the Second Amendment is honored and the unconstitutional requirement for registration of pre-1934 weapons is revoked.
Leave it to the ATF to destroy a historical piece.
And leave it to a ditzy librarian to be skeered of an inanimate object
They are looney-tunes. As the proud grandson of another WWI vet how also single-handedly knocked out a few machine gun nests, I am horrified and disgusted by this dastardly action, to remove a hard-won trophy of that PARTICULAR war.
Machine guns mowed whole lines of troopers down -- the Canadians and Welsh in particular. Tragically, the Allied general staff did not adapt easily to the machine age of warfare. Hundreds of thousands slaughtered by that institutional arrogance and ignorance in the command ranks.
We should not be damned by small minded men who so crudely and ignorantly tear out such hard-won remembrances of the war, for by such idiocy we raise generations ignorant of a past that should be respected for its hard-won wisdoms.
How the heck did it get to Mass? That’a what I want to know.
It must be preserved to make real the heroism of our fathers and grandfathers.
On the off-chance this is not a rhetorical question, here's a demonstration of what sort of people join BATF.
They had a contest some time back for the kiddies, "What does your daddy do at work?"
I'm going to post the instructions on how to get to the picture because an attempt to get to it directly fails sometimes; hopefully it will appear at the bottom of this post.
The introductory page is here. From there, hit the "Ages 6&7" tab.
Check the top-center picture, a "Winning Entry", by little "Dixon". What does it look like?
I guess ATF wants no reminders of the long gone era when this country had testesterone.
Hahaha...daddy burning someone’s house down.
...or a church...
Looks to me like a cross on top ... and stained-glass windows.
An excellent idea!
Or alternatively, Rock Island Arsenal. (then it would be close enough to drive and see once in a while)
They have a fine collection of issue military arms and prototypes, machine guns, and cannon dating back quite a ways.
Q. What caliber is it?
A. .303 caliber.
Q. Where can I get .303 ammo for it?
A. Nowhere.
Q. So...how dangerous is this "weapon"?
A. Propelled by sufficient force it would make a considerable club.
The ATF are a bunch of morons.
Control freaks with fascistic tendencies, also mouth breathing, booger eating, knuckle dragging individuals whose family tree hasn’t forked in the middle for several generations. Any more easy questions?
Yeah, but he had some interesting pals.
FT. OGLETHORPE, GA - TENNESSEE'S TWO GREAT WAR HEROES, SGT ALVIN YORK (FAR RIGHT) AND S/SGT. PAUL HUFF. S/SGT. HUFF PREFERRED THE TSMG AND ALVIN YORK THE SPRINGFIELD.
I think I can do a little better than that.
Q. Where can I get .303 ammo for it?
A. Nowhere.
J&G Guns offers .303, which is not the ammo for this gun.
Midway has various 7,9 Mauser loadings available, listed under the common American designation of *8mm*.
Q. So...how dangerous is this "weapon"?
A. Propelled by sufficient force it would make a considerable club.
What it would do then, it can do now, given ammo, a reasonable supply of belts and a knowledgable and skilled operator. That last is probably the hardest to find nowadays, but there are a couple around.
The 08/15 has one other characteristic that should be noted. It is singularly responsible for more causalities on the battlefield than any other weapon ever deployed, including the Atomic Bomb. It has truly earned the reputation of the Devils Paint Brush.
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One good place to look: The Annual Hiram Maxim Machinegun Shoot, held every year the third weekend of July; last one I caught was at Dover-Foxcroft, ME, not terribly far north of Massachusetts.
The sight of a 50-yard firing line staffed with a belt-fed machinegun every meter and a half apart is something to see, particularly at night during the tracer shoot. It's also something to hear, so bring hearing protection if you come.
Are you sure that’s Sgt. York? I thought he looked like Gary Cooper.
We had a case where a grandmother found her husband’s MP-40 in the attic, took it in to a gun store and all parties interested transferred it to the Cantigny museum. (Col McCormack’s).
303 is available..but not in belts.
He did during *his war,* the Great War, that War that was supposed to End Wars but didn't.
And so he is pictured there in his later days, during the Second World War, with a fellow Tennessee veteran and MOH holder of WWII. The M1A1 Thompson SMG, developed around 1942 and unavailable previously, is the giveaway.
Those guns, along with their British version, the Vickers were capable of firing tens of thousands of rounds at one sitting for as long as you kept the warer jacket full of water. Old or not they were and are still capable of near continuous firepower.
Great story! I hope the gun ends up in a museum.
If that is the same rimmed .303 that the canadian Ross rifle and the bolt rifles used, it is available.
MG dealer Kent Lomont, who also operates a commercial reloading business, once set up a Vickers in a creek at the twice-annual Kentucky machinegun shoot at Knob Creek, feeding the gun from a pickup truck bed filled with loaded gun. The gun was fired in a continuous burst, the water jacket being kept filled from the creek.
Since then, Kent's been known as *Constant* Lomont to the K.C shooters and crew.
That's not quite the probable all-time record. Ian V. Hogg, in Weapons & War Machines, describes an action that took place in August, 1916, during which the 100th Company of the Machine Gun Corps fired their ten Vickers guns continuously for twelve hours. They fired a million rounds between them, using one hundred new barrels, without a single breakdown.
"It was this absolute foolproof reliability which endeared the Vickers to every British soldier who ever fired one."
A German machine captured by Sgt York, and all the ATF can think of is to DESTROY it?
Not only are they a bunch of jack-booted thugs, they collectively have the IQ of a watermelon!
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