Free Republic

International warfare has created some of the most profound advances in technology and concepts, and the underwater arena is no exception. Following up on last issue’s look at the pistols of combat divers in Russia’s, Germany’s and America’s navies, we dive here into long guns of frogmen. APS Underwater RifleThe APS or Avtomat Podvodnyj Spetsialnyj Underwater Rifle was developed during the early 1970s by the Soviet Central Institute for Precision Machine Building (TsNIITochMash plant). The inspiration for this was that Russian combat divers only had knives and the SPP-1 underwater pistol (see American Shooting Journal, June 2015 issue) as their...

U.S. president meets with Pentagon officials following weekend airstrikes in eastern Syria The complex threat of the ISIS extremist group will not be ultimately defeated by guns but through ideology, Barack Obama says. The U.S. president made the remarks Monday on the military campaign against the Islamic State group after being briefed by Pentagon officials earlier in the day. He called for co-operation among countries in a fight he said spills over borders. Obama will look to partner with Muslim communities that he said are often the target of ISIS attacks. "The battle for hearts and minds is going to...

Lynne Russell thanks the right to keep and bear arms for keeping her and her husband alive during an armed robbery on June 30th. The former CNN anchor and Chuck de Caro, formerly a CNN reporter, were held at gun point in an Albuquerque Motel 6 room by felon Tomorio Walton. What ensued was a stand-off that left Walton dead and de Caro shot three times. Russell was not injured in the shootout. Russell told FOX411 that having a gun “absolutely” saved their lives.

CHICAGO (CBS) — Mayor Rahm Emanuel says police are doing all they can to quell violence on the streets, but the problem requires having fewer guns on the streets and more moral values in the homes, reports WBBM Political Editor Craig Dellimore. Mayor Emanuel says he is both saddened and sickened by the rash of gun violence that claimed so many lives this weekend while police officers were on 12-hour shifts and the city’s summer jobs program is employing more people than ever.

Can a stack of iPhones protect a Samsung Galaxy S6 from a blast fired from a Russian assault rifle? You'll just have to watch and see. See the video here. Whenever a new iPhone comes out, there are lots of questions about its screen resolution, its battery life, the quality of its camera... You know, normal questions. A YouTube user known as EverythingApplePro recently had another kind of question about the shiny slabs of tech -- just how many of them it would take to stop a bullet shot at close range from an AK-74. No, that's not a typo;...

The man arrested in the fatal shooting of a woman at San Francisco’s Pier 14 has confessed to the crime – though he said it was an accident. In a jailhouse interview Sunday with KGO-TV’s Cornell Barnard, Francisco Sanchez, speaking in a mix of Spanish and English, said he had found the gun, wrapped inside a shirt, while he was sitting on a bench and smoking a cigarette at the pier. He had picked it up and “it started to fire on its own,” Mr. Sanchez said, adding that he has poor vision and was under the influence of sleeping...

Fourth of July weekend shootings have left nine people dead — including a 7-year-old boy — and at least 47 others injured since Thursday evening. Seven-year-old Amari Brown was killed in a shooting that also left a 26-year-old woman wounded late Saturday in the Humboldt Park neighborhood. [Snip] The boy’s father, Antonio Brown, is a ranking gang member with 45 previous arrests and was not cooperating with police as of Sunday afternoon as they tried to find his son’s killer, Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy said Sunday.

TAMPA — Most of the 21 homicides and more than two dozen shootings Tampa police have investigated this year have several factors in common. The violence primarily is a result of neighborhood feuds among groups of mostly young black men, police say. All of the shootings took place in East and West Tampa. And investigators are struggling to get information from witnesses and victims about who committed the crimes. Another pattern has emerged that has Tampa police and federal authorities working together to put a stop to it: Most of the bullets are being fired from stolen guns. “We believe...

A man in his mid-20s was fatally shot late Saturday night in Dorchester, Boston Police Commissioner William Evans said in an interview. At 10:50 p.m. on Holborn Street, a car was seen firing shots before it fled, Evans told reporters on the scene. The man, whose name was not released, died at the scene. A second man had his arm “grazed,” Evans said, and he was taken to the hospital for minor injuries.

A 7-year-old boy and two men were killed overnight and at least 27 other people were injured during an 8-hour stretch that started not long after dark.. About 11:55 p.m., a 7-year-old boy was killed and a 26-year-old woman was injured in a shooting in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, police said. The woman and the boy were standing on a sidewalk in the 1100 block of North Harding Avenue when gunfire erupted and bullets hit them, police said. The boy was hit in the right side of the chest and was taken to Stroger Hospital in critical condition. He was...

Some time after I bought my first gun, I got a robocall from the National Rifle Association, asking me to join. After the customary “Please stay on the line …” from a pleasant but earnest voice, I recoiled from the barkings of an angry-sounding man: “Did I know that Barack Hussein Obama and European leaders are meeting on American soil right now, at this very moment, to plot the confiscation of my guns?” The caller continued with his insinuations of an imminent United Nations plot against America, but before I could be handed off to a live operator, I hung...

When Francisco Sanchez allegedly gunned down Kathryn Steinle at San Francisco’s Pier 14 on July 1, Breitbart News discovered that Sanchez had been deported from the country five times. We also discovered another interesting tidbit–Sanchez has seven felonies, which means he faces 100 percent gun control 100 percent of the time. He is completely barred from gun possession and prohibited from having the gun with which he allegedly shot and killed Steinle.

What could be more patriotic on the Fourth of July than playing the Star-Spangled Banner with a Ruger 10/22? Chris Cheng demonstrates:

"Guns and fireworks are symbols of the birth of our Nation and our freedom. The beautiful spectacle in the skies and the loud booms created by fireworks are a proxy for the gunfire that forged us as a unified nation. Thus, guns and fireworks are symbols of independence and the power to secure it. Tyrants hate that. More and more around the country, there are restrictions on gun sales as well as fireworks. This is a symptom of the same illness; over-reaching autocrats pushing their will on the people. When the Second amendment is encroached, the banning of fireworks is...

Some time after I bought my first gun, I got a robocall from the National Rifle Association, asking me to join. After the customary “Please stay on the line. . .” from a pleasant but earnest voice, I recoiled from the barkings of an angry-sounding man: “Did I know that Barack Hussein Obama and European leaders are meeting on American soil right now, at this very moment, to plot the confiscation of my guns?” The caller continued with his insinuations of an imminent United Nations plot against America, but before I could be handed off to a live operator, I...

Last year, Democrat Senator Ed Markey (NY) and Democrat Rep. Carolyn Maloney (Mass) introduced legislation suggesting Barack Obama’s Centers for Disease Control (CDC) be paid $10 million/year to fund “…research on gun violence prevention and firearm safety.” According to the far left Markey, “it is time we study the issue of gun violence like the public health crisis that it is. If we want to prevent injury and deaths from guns, we need to know what can be done to prevent it.” Truth be told, Markey and Maloney believe the best way to prevent gun violence is by making it...

A road trip down old Route 66 led to a Wild West-style motel shootout for a pioneering CNN anchor and her former-soldier hubby. Lynne Russell — the first woman to ever solo-anchor a primetime network news show — and Chuck de Caro, 65, had stopped at a Motel 6 for the night in Albuquerque when an intruder slipped into their room as Russell went to grab something from the car around 11:30 p.m. Tuesday. “I opened the door and he materialized out of nowhere; he was inside,” she told The Post. “And he pushed me into the room and onto...

The data for these numbers has been gathered from two sources.  From 1945 to 1987, the data was taken from "Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America" by Gary Kleck, Table 2.1.   The methodology used by Kleck was applied to  the figures obtained from the ATF for later years.  The number shown is the cumulative addition of domestic manufacture plus imports minus exports.  This does not count guns shipped to the U.S. military.   The figures are rounded to the nearest million. Kleck attributes the 1945 - 1968 numbers to Newton and Zimring, which includes the calculation of the 1945...

Kalashnikov USA announced on Tuesday that it is now selling AK-47 assault rifles and shotguns that have been manufactured at a U.S. factory. The Kalashnikov USA web site provides a menu of two rifles and two shotguns, all semiautomatics. One of the rifles features a curved, banana-style high-capacity magazine with 30 rounds.

Early in 2002, as the Second Intifada was raging, guns — normally ubiquitous in Israeli society — were even more in evidence. In restaurants, at synagogue and especially on the street, you could see pistols stuck into men’s belts or pants. One of my wife’s closest friends kept a gun in her purse. Those were dangerous times in Israel. More than once, legally armed civilians killed or wounded terrorists in places as seemingly benign as the grocery store. I decided that I, too, should probably get a gun license, and promptly went to the appropriate government office to apply. Obama...