Nothing in this video will be new to anyone who’s actually knowledgeable about firearms. But because so many Second Amendment opponents are either knowingly dishonest or willfully ignorant of such basic facts, here’s Forgotten Weapons’ Ian McCollum defining exactly what an assault rifle is.
“An assault rifle:
Is a select fire rifle, which means it can fire either semi-automatic or fully automatic or burst (a form of fully automatic)
That uses a detachable magazine
And is chambered for an intermediate cartridge, which means something larger than a pistol cartridge but smaller than a traditional full power rifle cartridge.”
Got that? If it’s not capable of firing fully automatic, it’s not an assault rifle, no matter how much bad Democratic Party legislation says otherwise.
“A semi-automatic rifle that meets the other two criteria, like a semi-auto AR-15 does not meet criteria, that is not an assault rifle.” No automatic fire mode, no assault rifle.
“The reason people think this is not a valid term goes to the late 1980s, and then especially 1994, when in the United States there was an assault weapon prohibition passed. Now, it was a ban with a sunset, so only lasted 10 years, and in 2004 it went poof and disappeared and is no longer in force.”
“But what that legislation did was legally define not assault rifles, but assault weapons, and it did so with rifles, with shotguns, and with handguns.”
“The definition in that law was not the same as the technically recognized definition of an assault rifle, in that essentially what they were trying to do was a blanket prohibition on firearms that had a military appearance. And so the elements that defined assault in that legislation were things like bayonet lugs, grenade launchers, folding stocks, threaded muzzles, barrel shrouds, and that sort of thing. No relation to the technical definition of assault rifle.”
“What they were trying to do is take a scary military phrase and apply it to not scary, or potentially scary-appearing civilian firearms that they wanted to restrict or prohibit.”
So any time a leftwing politician tries to lie about what an assault rifle is to further their quest for complete civilian disarmament, just send them this.
While Israel pounds the snot out of it, Hamas continues its long-running video deception operations. “Pallywood” usually uses its video editing to gin up more Palestinian civilian casualties from Israeli, but this time they’re trying to convince the world they make their own “al-Ghoul” sniper rifles. Ian McCollum looks at the resulting video, and concludes that, once again, they’re full of it.
Pretty much nothing they’re doing in the video involves actual manufacturing of sniper rifles.
“Yesterday Hamas posted a video on Twitter/X that is purporting to show them manufacturing what they call the al-Ghoul sniper rifles in some secret bunker, presumably in Gaza. This is nonsense. I thought we should take a minute and let’s go through this video and see what’s actually being shown in it.”
“Because I’ve manufactured rifles, I’ve been in a lot of rifle factories, I’ve done hand loading, I’ve seen a lot of hand loading, I’ve seen ammunition factories, and this video includes none of that.”
“They’ve got the two guys working on lathes. And they clearly want you to think that these are barrels on the lathes. However, what they are doing here is turning the outside profile of the barrel. The difficult element in manufacturing a barrel, if you want to convince me that you are actually manufacturing barrels, what I want to see is the rifling process, because otherwise you got nothing.”
“If you are making a barrel, the first thing you’re going to do is center bore it (what they actually call ‘gun drill’ it), then you are going to ream it, then you are going to rifle it and then lastly you are going to turn the outside diameter.”
“Immediately on the next shot we see them turning the outside profile of this piece of steel and there is smoke coming off of it. You don’t want smoke coming off. They are not running lubricant on this. That’s a problem, that’s not how you manufacture precision anything, much less precision sniper rifles.”
“What they are doing looks like machining, but it’s wrong in all sorts of ways.” I’m going to omit some of the technical details, but What He Said.
“The al-Ghoul is not a domestic Gazan or Palestinian designed firearm, the al-Ghoul is actually an Iranian AM-50, which is like the Steyr HS .50 that we have at home. Iran purchased like 800 HS .50s a bunch of years ago. They then reverse engineered it and made a really crude copy of it that they call the AM-50, that they have provided to all sorts of basically terror and terror-associated groups.”
“What we’re looking at here is an Iranian manufactured AM-50.”
“I think they are making dummy parts for the sake of video here.”
He thinks they may actually be manufacturing the optics mount.
“He guy’s pulled one [part] off of the mill and he’s measuring it, like let’s measure a random part to look good on camera.”
He said it looks a whole lot like how reality TV depicts gun manufacturing.
“There is absolutely nothing in that shot that couldn’t be take a complete Iranian rifle, detail strip it, take all the pieces apart, and then turn on the camera and put the pieces back together.”
“One of the most interesting shots in the video, which is the marking on the side of this gun. Because this says something like Al Qassam Brigade Sniper Rifle, 12.7x99mm. 12.7×99 by the way is .50 Browning.” AKA .50 BMG.
“The guy pulls out a round of 12.7 ammo and now they want to show you their manufacturing process of precision ammo. And there’s some stuff in here that is definitely wrong.” Like the steel case, which may be fine for Soviet designed crap, but isn’t right for .50 BMG, and is much harder to reload properly than brass.
There are a lot more details why the ammo loading process is wrong. I’m just going to note that Hamas has a lower-rate, cruder ammo-reloading setup than random Texas gun owners I’ve known. You can get a fully progressive reloading press for under a grand these days, none of this hand-loading assembly line crap that takes Hamas members away from their main job of killing Israeli women and children.
“I don’t think we saw any actual loading of ammunition here.”
“I’m pretty sure that the al-Ghoul is, in fact, essentially is a re-badged Steyr AM-50.”
“The AM-50 is not a particularly great rifle.”
“The only thing we can see 100% in this video is that they have complete AM-50s that they have disassembled and put back together. And they want you to think that they are manufacturing stuff.”
Almost immediately, the rifles were plagued with problems. The L86A1’s bipod tended to fail to lock, were weak, and generally crappy. Additionally, the plastic melted when it interacted with bug repellant, and the metal rusted easily. The weapons were found to be unreliable in both arctic and desert environments.
The SA80 family used stamped steel, which the Brits had experience with in the form of the Sten gun. However, the Sten had much lower tolerances than the SA80. The tighter tolerances required more skilled labor and better machinery. This led to tons of waste and slow production of the SA80 family of rifles and squad support weapons.
Their first trial by combat came to be in the Gulf War and then later in African operations. It’s tough to say anything nice about these weapons’ performance in the desert. Both the L85A1 and L86A1 proved to be unreliable. The L85A1 worked best on fully automatic, and the L86A1 worked best on semi-auto. This created was the inverse of how the weapons were intended to be used.
The polymer furniture fell apart easily. The magazines and the magazine catch proved problematic. It was too easy to access and would cause soldiers to accidentally drop magazines. The top cover catch required tape to hold it in place. The weapons needed to be kept incredibly clean and could deform if gripped too hard.
The weapon overheated quickly, the firing pin was fragile and broke easily, and dirt could accumulate behind the trigger and prevent it from being pulled. The safety selector could swell when it got wet and render the weapon useless. SAS operator and Gulf War commando Chris Ryan stated that the SA80 was “poor-quality, unreliable weapons at the best of times, prone to stoppages, and it seemed pretty tough to have to rely on them.”
It’s easy to see why the rifles sucked. The British Ministry of Defence commissioned a report that stated,
“The SA80 did not perform reliably in the sandy conditions of combat and training. Stoppages were frequent despite the considerable and diligent efforts to prevent them. It is extremely difficult to isolate the prime cause of the stoppages.
It is, however, quite clear that infantrymen did not have CONFIDENCE in their personal weapons. Most expected a stoppage in the first magazine fired. Some platoon commanders considered that casualties would have occurred due to weapon stoppages if the enemy had put up any resistance in the trench and bunker clearing operations.
Even discounting the familiarisation period of desert conditions, when some may have still been using the incorrect lubrication drill, stoppages continued to occur.”
Commenter BigFire noted that Ian McCollum had done a video on the weapon, and he’s no less scathing:
“Can you hear that? I can hear it. That’s the sound of every former British service member cringing at the mere sight of this rifle. And it’s so loud you can hear it over the internet.”
“This is, probably more so than any other firearm in current service, a giant scandal of plastic and metal.”
They started with a proprietary 4.85mm cartridge, but eventually went with 5.56 NATO. Brits didn’t go with the M16 because they wanted a bull-pup (and presumably because they wanted to make them domestically).
Desert Storm: “The guns really performed poorly in the sand. And there was a report that was written detailing all of these problems and submitted to MOD in the aftermath of Desert Storm. And it got leaked to the public. And this document basically said, ‘These guns are a piece of junk, and they never work.'”
The Brits turned to Heckler & Koch (which was actually owned by a British company at the time) to fix the weapon. “And they came up with just a couple things to fix, namely everything. In the rebuild they either replaced or redesigned the bolt, the gas piston, the gas block, the front trunnion, the hammer, all of the springs, pretty much all of the pins, the magazine release, and the furniture [stock, grip and handguard], and the charging handle, and probably a couple other things that I’ve forgetting about. They basically kept the receivers as a shell and replaced everything else inside them.”
“They rebuilt about 200,000 of these rifles into what became known as the L85A2 configuration, for the cost of about £92 million.”
“They had far more problems than the M16 did in Vietnam, and yet still to this day we hear about the M16 being an unreliable piece of junk, because of some limited issues that were actually pretty easily fixed in the early days of Vietnam. Well, the L85 had much more substantial and severe problems to begin with. And even though the A2 appears to be a pretty darn good gun now, its reputation is dead forever … because of how bad the A1 was.”
Making simple weapons that can be turned out on prosumer grade CNC machines gets easier and easier every year, but designing automatic weapons that reliably work across a wide range of combat situations is still hard…
Ian McCollum tackles an important and long-debated question among AR-15 owners: Can you run .223 Remington and 5.56 NATO ammo interchangeably without any problems?
Short answer: Yes!
Plus he clears up a little bit of misunderstanding about “military grade” ammo.
Like a Marvel crossover comic that features two characters you’re interested in, having both Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons and tank expert Nicholas Moran talk about the .50cal machine gun (and why the Germans never adopted it) did indeed peak my interest.
A few takeaways:
“That the M2 I think is so well known today, it’s so recognized and … is ubiquitous. During World War Two, the U.S. kind of did a like a massive industrial flex on the rest of the world with the M2. It’s a bit memey, but you could think of this as like the classic Uncle Sam painting with like glowing red eyes of fire. Because the US manufactured about 2 million Browning .50 caliber machine guns.”
“We’re going to put them on trucks, we’re going to put them on tanks, we’ll put them on some Jeeps, we’ll put them on half-tracks. We’ll put four of them together in a big mount and put that on a half-track or on a trailer. It’s like Oprah just handing out .50 cal machine guns.”
Because McCollum didn’t know, he asked Moran, leading to the special Gun Jesus/Chieftain Crossover Issue.
Moran’s first cut: “Dunno! Let me ask around.”
For starters, the Germans used small canons instead of big machine guns.
It was a hell of a lot safer to be buttoned up in the tank with aircraft shooting at you than outside it trying to score an unlikely machine gun kill.
“The reality was that aircraft generally were horrible at killing tanks.” (Caveat: I hear the Stuka version with the 37mm cannon was actually pretty good at it, but German tankers obviously didn’t have to worry about that.)
Also, since they thought taking out aircraft with machine guns was unlikely, one light machine gun with tracers was just as good as four heavy machine guns at “giving pilots something to think about” on their strafing runs.
The Germans did have “the MG 131, a 13mm weapon, and thus as close to a caliber .50 as possible. Though primarily an electrically primed aircraft gun, it could be converted to a ground mount and percussion fired. It could thus be mounted on a tank much like an American caliber .50, yet it never was.”
Germans had a doctrinal preference for saving ammo wherever possible if the possibility for effective fire was too low. Americans had a doctrinal preference for turning out giant piles of ammo.
“If you want something which provides a lot of coverage, and has a good chance of actually shooting down a target, especially an armoured one like an IL-2, you’re better off with a heavier gun on a dedicated platform with a trained, dedicated anti-aircraft crew.”
There are a lot of small countries, especially in the southern and eastern areas of Europe for whom [a Russian invasion] may not have been a plausible scenario two weeks ago, but it’s kind of looking like one now. And if you are a small country close to the borders of Russia, you’re in this difficult defensive position. None of these countries have a military that can, with a straight face, suggests that it could simply put up a toe-to-toe, stand their ground fight and defeat a military the size of the Russian army.
I’m going to point out that this is not necessarily true. Finland did it in The Winter War in 1939-1940. But he gets to that.
Yet you want you have to provide some sort of plausible threat to an invading occupier like Russia to avoid being invaded in the first place. The whole point is that the best possible success in repulsing an invasion is to not get invaded in the first place. So how can you convince a country like Russia that your very small little republic is not worth invading, that it is too difficult to invade? A lot of these countries are looking around, and going “Would NATO actually step up and help us directly, help defend us in case of an invasion? Any maybe NATO would, maybe NATO wouldn’t.”
One big solution is civilian military firearms ownership and preparedness. And here modern Finland comes up:
There is a specific division called SRA which is essentially reservists shooting society, and it is it’s actually technically in some cases for gun, rifle, pistol, shotgun and precision rifle. In competition it requires competitors to essentially carry a military loadout; they have to wear armor, they have to carry water, they have to carry a minimum amount of ammunition during the stages…It’s specifically to encourage military readiness .
“Having a large community of competent civilian marksmen is something that can contribute a very real deterrent to invasion.”
True. Every nation in Europe should make civilian firearms ownership more widely and legally available, for this and other reasons.
If you wonder why it takes so long to get new guns into production, Ian McCollum has an answer for you: Because designing and manufacturing guns is hard. Mainly because of the extensive trial and error necessary to establish the correct tolerances for each part.
Today I’m doing something I don’t think I’ve ever done before: Take a video I’ve already linked from a LinkSwarm and put it up here, because there are a lot of important lessons to learn.
You should watch all of this:
On April 9, Scott Allen DeShields, Jr. of Kentucky Ballistics was shooting old SLAP rounds through his single-shot Serbu RN 50 when a hot round burst the chamber, shearing the threads off his locking cap and sending pieces of metal flying back at him. Damage included a lacerated jugular, in-tubing a collapsed lung without anesthetic, orbital bone repair and 5 pints of blood.
Him surviving was a combination of being very lucky, having a father with law enforcement training right there to help slow the bleed, and doing exactly the right things to get him alive and conscious to treatment (the ambulance met them halfway, and then had him life-flighted to Vanderbilt Hospital).
Here, Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons discusses the accident, what went wrong (and right) in the aftermath of the Kentucky Ballistics malfunction, and covers in-battery and out-of-battery failure modes for various firearms.
He has some very good advice that goes beyond basic firearms safety. One of the most important is: If something seems “off,” stop and try and figure out what it. The life you save could be your own…
What better Sunday viewing fodder than tanks, Walt Disney, and Hitler in Hell?
That’s just the beginning of the full video, which gives more technical detail and instructions on how to use the rifle:
The Boys Mark 1 antitank rifle was based on an .50 BMG cartridge upped to a .55 projectile, and was the primary anti-tank weapon available to the British Commonwealth at the outbreak of World War II. Could it actually take out German Panzers?
Eh. Sort of. Briefly.
The Mark II variant bullet was capable of penetrating “0.91 inches (23.2 mm) of armor at 100 yd (91 m).” So it could theoretically take out Panzer Is and IIs. But Panzer IIIs, starting with the Ausf. D version in 1938, had at least 30mm armor, so they were already useless against German medium tanks when the war began. So it was pretty much obsolete when the Walt Disney video was made.
Here’s Ian McCollum talking about the rifle:
And here he is firing it:
And finally, because of the name of the rifle, and because it’s my blog, and because why the hell not:
Heading toward Fourth of July weekend, I was looking through YouTube for more things that go boom when I came across this video of a gun infamous for not going boom. Ladies and gentlemen, feast your eyes on the nightmare-fueled horror that is the Zip 22:
It’s bad enough that it’s butt-ugly, cheaply made and anti-ergonomic, but is also infamous for malfunctioning. “Worst gun ever” has to be a target-rich environment, but the Zip 22 seems like a real strong contender. (I suppose the World War II Japanese Nambu Type 94 Shiki Kenju 8mm pistol, which could be fired accidentally by touching the sear, is actually worse from a safety viewpoint.)
But the detail that made write this post was the fact that the manufacturer offered an optional backward Picatinny rail for the top so you could mount this gun on the rail of a real gun. It’s like all those “Chainsaw bayonet attachment” memes come to life.
How unreliable is it? Ian McCollum was surprised he was actually able to fire off an entire magazine before it malfunctioned.
Here’s a guy shooting a Zip 22, who experiences a host of malfunctions (failure to eject, double-feed, etc.) in the course of firing off six magazines.
And the ejection port is so close to your finger that sometimes you get hot brass jammed up against your digits, as in this NSFW video:
Don’t think I’ll be buying one of these anytime soon…
