Free Republic

1879 Reichsrevolver with a homemade ejector rod and optical sight. The 1879 Reichsrevolver was adopted by the German military a few years after German unification. Author attached a red dot optical sight without modifying the revolver. It is clamped on, with no metal removed. Ejector rods were separate. The one above is homemade.Consider the pistol the revolvers were to replace, the Kavalleriepistol M 1850. It is about .59 caliber, firing a 267 grain round ball from a smooth bore, contained in a paper cartridge with about 67 grains of black powder.Interpolating from data measured at the YouTube channel capandball, the...

The French Education Ministry said classes were totally or partially suspended at 891 schools after widespread damage occurred to schools and mounting injuries among staff, students and police. French Education Ministry suspended classes at nearly 900 schools nationwide Tuesday amid an increase in rioting over the country's school system and a lack of air conditioning in classrooms. The demonstrations in Paris have devolved into confrontations with law enforcement, and video footage has shown rioters clashing with police, who have deployed tear gas. Protests in Strasbourg, Lyon and Rennes have also turned violent at times, with demonstrators lighting fires and hurling...

Furious residents of Minneapolis suburbs erupted at their political leaders for failing to address recent shootings involving Somalis. The placid community of Edina, slightly more than 10 miles southeast of Minneapolis, has been shaken by a string of apparent gang shootings over the last few months. On July 22, shots were fired at Yancey Park during a 'large gathering.' Another shooting followed on September 22 outside Our Lady of Grace Church while a community basketball game was being played. No one was hurt in either incident. Angry locals demanded accountability for the shootings, which remain unsolved, on Monday night during...

A scheduled military execution is set for December 3rd. We examine the procedures for the first such event in 65 years. The U.S. military justice system has scheduled the execution of former Army Major Nidal Hassan at Fort Hood. This event marks a significant procedural milestone, as it would be the first time in over six decades that the armed forces have carried out a capital sentence. Understanding how a firing squad operates requires looking at the specific regulations governing capital punishment. We break down the historical context and the legal framework that leads to this rare application of the...

We have spent centuries building societies on the assumption that people can govern themselves. Our institutions are premised on individual responsibility, private property, free expression, voluntary association, markets, constitutional limits, and the belief that adults can generally be trusted to govern themselves. Yet much of today’s politics appears to be moving in the opposite direction. Competence increasingly seems negotiable, perhaps even disqualifying. Expertise is often treated with suspicion. Complex problems are compressed into slogans. Identity matters more than accomplishment, authenticity more than knowledge, and how a politician makes people feel more than that politician’s ability. Why? And more importantly, what...

Hinson faulted Turek for missing votes in the state House and for taking advantage of a per diem for state lawmakers even when he was not there. “You took the per diem, you stole from taxpayers, you should refund that money,” Hinson said. Turek did not respond to that criticism during the debate. You trash the president during the primary and now you’re doing ads saying you’re going to work with him,” Hinson shot back. “It’s a tale of two Tureks.”

Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich says her organization feels "vindication" after a new Justice Department report revealed the FBI opened dozens of assessments involving parents following a controversial Biden-era directive targeting threats against school officials, including an investigation stemming from a tip that cited one mother's membership in a "right-wing mom's group." "My reaction and our reaction at Moms for Liberty is vindication," Descovich told Fox News Digital. "We feel… we're finally being heard." Descovich said parents involved with her organization became fearful of speaking publicly after the Justice Department and FBI's response to heated school board battles beginning...

Texas authorities executed a man on Wednesday, the first execution in the nation since Christa Pike survived two lethal injections in Tennessee in late September. Jamaal Howard, 46, was pronounced dead at 8:03 p.m. after receiving a fatal dose of pentobarbital at the state prison in Huntsville. He was convicted of killing Vickie Swartout, 42, during a store robbery in 2000. Howard’s attorneys unsuccessfully sought to block the execution by arguing that he was intellectually disabled and that he faced risks similar to those in Pike’s case because both states use pentobarbital for lethal injections. Asked by the warden if...

Secretary of State Marco Rubio furiously shut down media questions about explosive new allegations against U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle on Thursday, while Guilfoyle herself stood nearby as he prepared to leave Athens. As he stood before reporters, Rubio was pressed over a new Wall Street Journal report alleging Guilfoyle asked Trump donor Eric Deters to cover a $100,000 credit card bill shortly before her Senate confirmation hearing and offered access to administration officials in return. The secretary of state, however, made clear he had no intention of addressing the report on the tarmac when grilled by reporters, instead...

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was spotted Wednesday dining at a Palestinian restaurant — named for a child killed in Gaza — right after attending a candlelit vigil marking the third anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel. Mamdani visited Hinds Hall on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a branch of Palestinian chain Ayat. The restaurant takes its name from Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed in January 2024 alongside her family by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) while fleeing Gaza City. NYC @NYCMayor making quite a statement. Having dinner at the only Palestinian restaurant on the...

We are now less than a month out from the mid-term elections, and the single biggest theme that the Democrats have chosen to run on appears to be “affordability.” How can this possibly be? We live in the age of immediate availability of information, let alone artificial intelligence to track down anything that might previously have been challenging to find. If you want a state-by-state comparison of costs for any particular thing, you can get it in a fraction of a second. The results are in: the Democrat-run states are less “affordable.” The Democrats and Republicans propose opposite strategies for...

Deep Space Updates - Space News Laying out all the space stories from the last couple of weeks, SpaceX managed the feat of launching all 3 of it's Falcon 9 variants in one day, and that was 3 days after launching Starship to Orbit for the first time on flight 14. Rocket Lab signed a deal which will mean they'll build more boosters than SpaceX did for Falcon 9, NASA has a new space telescope, ESA's JUICE visited the Earth again. Blue Origin Taller Lunar Lander, SpaceX Launches All Its Rockets - Deep Space Updates Oct 6th | 35:27 Scott...

Democrat congressional candidate Bernadette Greene-Placentia, who is running in Arizona's 8th Congressional District, says she was out fixing a campaign sign at 2 AM when she was hit in the back of the head and fell unconscious. Greene-Placentia said she awoke with her pants down and one of her attackers still assaulting her, according to an interview with the Phoenix New Times. Then, according to Greene-Placentia, her assaulter called her a "democratic b*tch, not a very good f*ck." According to USA Today, Greene-Placentia reported the assault on Aug. 31, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office confirmed, and went public with what...

With less than a month to go before the midterms, the questionable polls keep piling up. I've been saying for a while that I think the GOP will outperform the polls this year, and a fresh report from CNN backs that up. According to CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten, there's some incredibly good news for the GOP in both the short term and long term, which may matter more than the polls. CNN anchor John Berman set up the segment by noting that plenty of surveys show the races slipping away from Republicans. He then asked Enten what the...

SEATTLE — Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson is facing criticism over remarks she made during a recent forum on fascism, Israel and Gaza. Wilson appeared Sept. 24 at Town Hall Seattle with authors Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor to discuss their book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World. At the event, Wilson praised the authors’ work and said she was “proud to share a stage” with them. After a video about a proposed vision for redeveloping Gaza, Wilson said the imagery juxtaposed “the genocide in Gaza” with “that AI-generated paradise, where someone’s obviously going to make a...

A beloved bronze statue of explorer Matthew Flinders has been cut down and stolen from a Mornington Peninsula park, leaving locals furious. The bronze statue at the entrance to Mornington Park was cut off at the ankles on Monday night in an attack similar to several others carried out by far-left extremist anti-Australian vandals in Melbourne in recent years. “It is with great sadness to announce that the Matthew Flinders bronze statue in Mornington, Victoria, has been destroyed by mindless, uneducated cancel culture vandals. I can’t begin to describe how angry this makes me feel right now,” one local said...

Forty years ago this month, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), a law intended as a grand bargain: legalizing millions of illegal aliens while establishing workplace enforcement to end the economic magnet that encouraged illegal immigration. Spoiler alert: the amnesty happened, the enforcement did not.

Another NFL star is raising questions about the U.S. moon landing. In a recent interview, New England Patriots quarterback Drake Maye shared he’s unsure if the United States really landed on the moon in 1969. Maye made his comments during a recent radio interview where he stated, “I’m not really sure 200% if we went there or not.” Boston 25 News was the first to report on Maye’s comments on the moon landing: New England Patriots QB Drake Maye has revealed he isn’t quite sure a famous touchdown really happened. During an appearance on WEEI on Monday, the topic of...

The e-commerce giant just dropped what it’s calling Amazon’s About You — essentially a showcase of your personality based on previous purchases, conversations with Alexa for shopping, any written product reviews and more. Technically, the retailer has been offering personalized shopping recs for years, using algorithms to push products it thinks you will like. Today, it does the same thing but on a bigger scale. This time, the popular commerce site has created an editable section for shoppers — which some folks are calling a personal dossier — where all of your habits and likes are displayed for you. The...

Four seconds. Four brutal seconds of utter silence that must have felt like an eternity for CBS News immigration correspondent Camilo Montoya-Galvez as he stared blankly at White House Border Czar Tom Homan, completely incapable of answering a simple question from the latter during an interview on Friday. Montoya-Galvez learned the hard way that you better do your homework when attempting to embarrass Homan with a statistic about ICE detention deaths. Failure to do so can result in permanent humiliation especially if you blank out for four full seconds and as an encore continuing to fail to provide an answer...