Culturally, the Swiss gun has all the significance of a hammer.. in the US it’s ‘got the whole ‘Give me freedom or give me death’ thing. In the UK it’s the whole ‘gangster’ chic… thus the view of a lot of my country men (and to a degree me included), if you need a gun to be ‘hard’, you never bloody well knew a real hard man. It’s like needing more than three people on one’s side to win a fight. You may ‘win’ but there’s a singular lack of kudos in needing two of your mates to hold someone down while you ‘win’ it…

All that lobbying and effort to make cats compulsory, and their manufacture is nearly as polluting as making low energy bulbs…

There was a VC awarded to a gent in the current nastiness just recently. He laid on a grenade to save his comrades, and survived.

As I’ve made no secret of, I’m no fan of this war, because it’s squandering many of our best in a fight that was only tangentially ours.

Final comment: I agree with George V when he stated

“The King feels so strongly that, no matter the crime committed by anyone on whom the VC has been conferred, the decoration should not be forfeited. Even were a VC to be sentenced to be hanged for murder, he should be allowed to wear his VC on the gallows.”

The bravery of the act that confers a VC cannot and should not be cancelled by anything subsequent or prior. It’s a reminder that, even in the meanest of us, there is a possibility of an honourable act.

should be regulated, can and should be licensed to those who have proven that they aren’t total idiots.

You have to prove nominal competency to drive a car, I think something like that with guns.

You needed a lot of physical strength to fire a PIAT that way, let alone a 2inch mortar (the mortar design was never much bothered with ‘kick’)

I think that his action at Arnhem would warrant a ’sir’ in most dialects I know (and probably Klingon)

They’re also working on an operator keyed handgun (less like the Lawgiver style prototype I saw) and a Metal Storm Mortar… (linked from the youtube)

1,000,000 rounds a second That’s a bloody big magazine.

One downside of the Metal Storm Mortar… you wouldn’t be able to do the trick that Robert H Cain pulled at The Battle of Arnhem… he was killing tanks by firing a PIAT (effectively an Anti-Tank Mortar variant) from his hip while his men fell back. The Allies thought the Germans were lying about how their tanks were being destroyed. Wiki him up. He won the VC for that action…

*sulks*

I wonder how many times St. Bruce has been quoted when somebody gets a new boomstick.

Yes, I consider Bruce Campbell a saint as he has done more to reaffirm my faith in humanity than any religious icon. So shop smart… Shop S-Mart! YOU GOT IT?

Egads, I have become a cliche’…

Strange to say, no one wants to talk about it much, and there’s very little on the web… but the great, grey stands of dead trees round some of those places reminds me of Chernobyl…

I wasn’t kidding about Sony, though… the b@st@rds…

there’s nothing like the ‘OMG’ factor of a criminal hearing a shell being pumped into the chamber in the dark.

Another ZA ’security expert’ I used to drink with used to say something very similar in his ‘domestic defence’ courses.

“Some people speak English, some speak Dutch, some speak Afrikaans. THey all speak the sound of a shotgun being loaded”

It’s probably about 10 years away from deployment, but the working (500 rpm) prototype looks a lot like the ‘Lawgiver’ from 2000AD’s Judge Dredd comic in the 1980s (it currently attached by an umbilical to a number of computers and a LARGE number of batteries)

God knows if it will ever REALLY go into the wild in its current form, but some of its features probably will (palm print operator identification is very nearly there, last I heard… that was mid-08, so I’m not up to date)