Oddly enough, "flashing" was a trend in the 1970s which continued on into the 1980s in the form of "streaking", running through a public area naked. Comedic singer Ray Stevens even authored a song about it, "The Streak".
Laverne & Shirley premiered.
It was a spin off of Happy Days and ran until 1983. Depicting two single women employed in a brewery in Milwaukee for most of its run, it was set in the 1950s to early 1960s. The last season was set in Burbank, California.
I can't say that I was a fan.
The Royal Moroccan Army attacked the Algerian Army at Amgala.
The House passed a bill already passed by the Senate to ban the sale of US arms to or to provide aid to paramilitary groups in Angola.
President Gerald R. Ford signed into law the Metric Conversion Act. The country should have carried through with it, but abandoned it in 1982 when Ronald Reagan was President, the point at which, in the long history of the evolution of things, the country began its slide into idiocy, although it was hardly evident at the time.
CIA Station Chief in Athens Richard Welch, his identify recently exposed, was gunned down by terrorists in Athens.
Fugitive member of the Black Panthers returned from self imposed exile in Paris in order to face murder charges.
During his time in Paris, he'd become a born again Christian and a clothing designer, having designed trousers with a prominent codpiece to free men, he said, from "penis binding".
They did not become popular.
Cleaver was highly eccentric. During his lifetime he swung widely in political views and he spent time in a wide variety of nations, including North Korea, Cuba, China and Algeria. He'd go on to a variety of religions after being a born again Christian before converting to Mormonism. About the same time he became a conservative Republican, and twice ran for the Senate. He'd end up, in spite of this, being convicted of drug possession. He died in 1998 at age 62. His ex wife, Kathleen, remains living and became a lawyer following their divorce in 1987.
He also left behind a son, Dr.Ahmad Maceo ibn Eldridge Cleaver, who was born in Algeria who passed away in Saudi Arabia in 2018 leaving himself three wives and 14 children. His daughter, Joju Cleaver, born in North Korea, is a professor at Georgia State University.
Lex Anteinternet: The dog that hasn't barked.: By the way, by odd coincidence, they've given Ghislaine Maxwell a therapy dog. None of this will matter. People will say this doesn...
What is going on here? Something sure is. Trump's called out all the stops, even bringing in Lauren Boebert to the Situation Room to pressure her. Beobert, who is somebody in the MAGA camp, is apparently refusing to go along with Trump.
That in and of itself is remarkable.
What we know is that up to 1,000 girls were raped in association with Epstein. We don't know all of the details of that by any means. Some of the rapes were pressured "statutory rapes", but others may have been physically violent rapes of female minors, based on what little we know. In either instance, the entire thing is horrific.
Was Trump a rapist? So far we have no reason to believe that, other than the "where there's smoke there's fire". Trump has, a long history of hanging out with those who have an interest in screwing teenagers and who have carried out their interest. Epstein wasn't the first in that category. The first that we know of, and probably the first significant person, was John Casablancas, who owned a modeling agency. Frankly, modeling agencies tend towards being morally dubious in some instances, but Casablancas was personally so. He divorced his first wife due to an affair with model Stephanie Seymour whom he began seeing when she was 14 years old. At age 50 he married 17 year old Aline Mendonça de Carvalho Wermelinger.
Casablancas represented Ivanka Trump when she became a fashion model at age 15.1
It's worth remembering here that Trump is nearly 80 years old. He was born in 1946, which means he turned 20, as a rich man, in 1966, and 30, in 1976. Trump, therefore, had wealth right in the era in which American sexual morals really began to plummet and he was in his 70s when the clubbing scenes in New York was in full swing.2 People complain about the US being a moral sewer now, but that's because their memories are bad. The 70s were really a decade of rank libertinism.3
They were also one which winked at Hebephilia and Ephebophilia, or rather, more accurately accepted the gross sexualization of early teenage girls and men preying on them, with that getting advanced at first by Playboy which really flirted with the lines of illegality with its centerfolds.4 Advertising in the era really dipped down into the younger years, for girls, in a way that you couldn't and wouldn't now, for instance:
How old do we think that girl is? Not old.
Brooke Shields as a young woman was shown only in her "Calvin Klein's" and portrayed a 12 or 13 year old prostitute in the 1976 film Pretty Baby (which she now detests) and a castaway in Blue Lagoon who grows into, I guess, a teenage common law marriage portrayed as the natural ideal. Shields regards herself as having been exploited, which she truly was. Only slightly older, 1968's Romeo and Juliet by Franco Zeffirelli featured Olivia Hussey' topless visage, albeit briefly, in a quite sexualized portrayal of the Juliet character. She was 14 years old and later sued.5
In spite of the horrors of such things as transgenderism, the re-creation of the lower class Victorian "common law" marriage arrangement in a new form in the American lower middle class, and the overall breakdown in sexual standards in the Western world, the outright aggressive exploitation of women sexually has really retreated. Retreating with it was a fairly open acceptance of what we'd now call "date rape". The concept that pressuring women into sex by way of position and power constituted rape flat out didn't exist. Even as a teenager myself in the 1970s, I can recall that jokes based on "get 'er drunk" were really common with the suggestion that happened relatively commonly, and that it wasn't regarded as rape. For that matter, as early as the early 1980s, I can recall instances of men in certain positions being caught in sexual relationships with underaged teens and simply losing their positions, quietly, over it.6
The point of all of this is that maybe a person could party down with John Casablancas while being a self admitted libertine and avoid picking the teenage fruit that others were picking, but most people who would find that morally reprehensible, which would be most people, would avoid hanging out with such people pretty quickly. For one thing, the behavior is gross and disgusting. For another, hanging out with kiddy diddlers would cause a person to run the risk of being regarded as a diddler.
Be that as it may, Trump went from Casablancas on to Jeffrey Epstein, whom he started hanging out with in the 1990s, some twenty, more or less, years after Casablancas. Epstein shows up in a Mar A Lago party's video footage in 1992. That party featured NFL cheerleaders. Trump flew on Epstein's private jet at least seven times in the 1990s. In 1997 Trump and Epstein were photographed together at a Victoria's Secret "Angels" party in New York. In 2002 Trump made his now infamous comment that Epstein was a "terrific guy" they shared interest in "beautiful women". Trump noted that Epstein's interests were in women on the "younger" side. In 2003 Trump drew a nude figure, with oddly small breasts, in a birthday card for Epstein, with a really enigmatic comment, and signed his name as, basically, pubic hairs.7
Now we know that Epstein had commented that Trump knew about the "girls" and that Epstein claimed, in a private email, that Trump knew this due to Virginia Giuffre, the teenager who would be supplied to Prince Andrew.. Giuffre's father worked as a maintenance manager at the Mar-a-Lago property and helped Giuffre obtain a job there. Maxwell recruited her to Epstein from Mar A Lago.
None of this proves in any fashion that Trump was diddling. Indeed, Giuffre states that Trump never touched her. Other women who were associated with Epstein have claimed that, but all of those claims have remained basically on the fringes of this story. So all that can really be said is that Trump has lead a life of moral dissolution with adult women, and he's hung around with men who had an extremely creepy attraction to girls in their teens, but there's no evidence that Trump personally crossed that line.
But there sure is a lot of evidence that he doesn't want the Epstein files released.
Indeed, he's downright desperate about it.
Why?
Earlier on Trump indicated he wanted the files released. Releasing the files became sort of a MAGA crusade, with MAGA's convinced that they'd provide damaging information on Bill (and maybe Hillary) Clinton. Indeed, as recently as a couple of months ago a MAGA I know maintained that the files were being kept secret due to what they'd show about Clinton, and maybe Obama (who is in no way implicated in any of this), thereby making the bizarre assertion that the Republicans are keeping material secret to protect a former Democratic President they detest.
Eh?
Given Trump's change in tune, what probably is in there is one of two things. One, the most likely, is that it's been pointed out that some rich and powerful person in the Trump circle is implicated, and badly. Trump may be protecting that person or persons, and if he is, there's some connection either with Trump or the GOP that must really be needed for protection.
The other possibility is that he knows, which he didn't before, that he's implicated as somebody who really knew something grotesque. Epstein himself, in his emails, noted that he apparently told Ghislaine to knock something off, and Trump has maintained that had to do with raiding staff from Mar A Lago. But what if what he knew is something worse, that women were being recruited to be sex slaves, which is basically what these poor girls were.
Whatever it is, we don't know.
The files are going to be released, which brings up these two things.
Trumps willingness to act illegally is now so pronounced that there has to be a strong suspicion that the files are being scrubbed. When they are released, and they will be, there's a good chance that some of the contents will be gone. This did occur to some extent with the files on the Kennedy Assassination, although I personally don't believe in the various conspiracy theories in that area, so it can definitely be accomplished.
For that reason, and for others, I also feel that the files should be released as is, complete with names of the victims. I know that's not the norm, and why, but the whole truth here is never going to come out if we don't know who was subject to this barbarity. And, ironically, in this instance releasing the names protects them. As noted earlier, Trump was sued by an anonymous woman who withdrew her suit after being subject to much pressure. There may perhaps be nothing to those claims, but the fact is, at this point, that we're dealing with men who are enormously wealthy and powerful, and have the means to threaten their victims as long as their identities remain unknown.
Footnotes:
1. On this, Trump has famously remarked about going back stage in, I believe, Miss World, competitions, or some such competitions, while the competitors were topless. These young women would, however, be of age. This is still pretty creepy.
2. The New York club scene was famously a cesspool, and heavily associated with drugs. There is, however, no reason to believe that Trump has ever taken illegal drugs. Indeed, due to the exposure to alcoholism provided by his brother, Trump does not drink.
3. As a minor note, the culture of the times reflected back in the form of music.
Rock music has been regarded, probably pretty inaccurately, as sort of countercultural. More accurately, when it was really popular, it reflected the cultural influence of people ranging from their teens into their thirties. Real rock music is pretty much dead now.
The 1970s and early 1980s saw a fair amount of rock music that outright endorsed ephebophilia and hebephilia. Ted Nugent's 1981 Jailbait outright did, with the female subject (victim) declared to be 13 years old. Kiss' 1977 subject was a bit older in Christine Sixteen. The Police hit the subject with Don’t Stand So Close to Me in 1980, which involves a teacher being attracted to a female student. That song is particularly creepy given its reference to Lolita and due to the fact that one of the members of The Police had been a teacher who admitted to having been attracted to female students, but not having acted upon it.
ABBA, which is regarded as sort of a bubblegum rock band, touched on the topic in 1979's Does Your Mother Know?, with the protagonist outright expressing torture over the advances of an underaged girl. The Knack's 1979 song Good Girls Don't at least kept the behavior down at mutual teenage level. Aerosmith broke into popularity with 1975's Walk This Way which is a tour de force of sexual double entendres all celebrating teenage sex. The story was flipped in Rod Stewart's 1971 Maggie May in which a teenage male regrets being seduced out of school by an older woman.
So that's a bunch of song, but were they that popular? Some really were, at least by my memory. I don't recall Nugent's song at all, but the only song of Nugent's I recall being popular wsa Cat Scratch Fever, which is about prostitutes. And Kiss was regarded, where I lived, as sort of juvenile joke more popular with junior high kids than us mature high schoolers, so I don't remember their song either.
The Police's Don't Stand So Close To Me, however, was hugely popular, although not with me, mostly because I can't stand that band. ABBA's Does Your Mother Know? was also big. Walk This Way was so big that even though it had been released in 1975, it was still really popular in the early 80s, which at the time was amazing as songs aged quickly. Maggie May shares that status as it was popular over a decade after its original release. Good Girls Don't didn't age well at all, in contrast, but it was huge in 1979.
Almost all of these songs, or maybe all of them, are outright reprehensible, which is the point. Amazingly, they were heard all the time in the 70s and 80s, and nobody really said anything about it. The only time I recall anyone condemning the lyrics of a song was in 1977 when a Parish Priest lambasted Only The Good Die Young by Billy Joel from the pulpit. I don't know where he'd learned of the song, but the Church was associated with the school, which went up to 9th Grade, and I now wonder if it was there. I was in junior high myself at the time and I had no idea what he was talking about. My father didn't either, and asked me about the song after Mass. It'd be years before I heard it, and like every Billy Joel song, I was underwhelmed.
4. We've touched on this before, but Playboy got in trouble in Europe as it was viewed as encouraging ephebophilia and hebephilia, and moreover being in that category while barely disguised as not being. It actually changed some of its content, notably its cartoons, as a result. Nonetheless, some Playboy models, such as Frances Camuglia were barely legal teens when photographed, and in fact a few were younger than 18 years old. One model's photographs went to press when she was still 17, with it apparently being the case that Playboy was unaware of her actual age, while it still played up that she was just out of high school. Another was outright known to be 17 when she was photographed with the magazine holding her photos until she turned 18.
5. All the then teenage actors in these films later maintained, probably correctly, that they suffered lifelong emotional trauma for having been in these films. Shields has been particularly critical of her mother for pushing her into them.
6. More specifically, I can recall three high school teachers in this category. Neither was arrested, they were simply let go. Another was a National Guard officer who was a local businessman. He was quickly discharged from the National Guard and there was as criminal proceeding, but the charge never hit the news and the resulting sentence was minor.
7. Trump has denied this, of course, but there seems to be no doubt. Assuming that it is Trump's, it's impossible not to conclude that he at least knew of Epstein's unrestrained lustful conduct. There was at least one other drawing, by somebody else, that alluded to the same thing. The thing here is that Epstein was strongly attracted to teenage girls, and if you know that the guy is strongly attracted to females sexually, and his targets are. . . well.
Postscript:
I thought about predicting this, but thought it too icky.
The last few days, as this has been breaking, I thought that, at some point, MAGA commentors would come out and basically start excusing ephebophilia. I should answer the question, first, on "what's that" although its been explained here before. According to Wikipedia:
Ephebophilia is the primary sexual interest in mid-to-late adolescents, generally ages 15 to 19 and showing Tanner stages 4 to 5 of physical development.
And now its happened.
Megyn Kelly "There's a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old…”
Well, yeah, there is, in more ways than one. A 5 year old is particularly gross as a victim and technically that's pedophilia. But ephebophilia is pretty darned disgusting as well, and rape in that context, which much or all of this would be by modern definitions is horrific. Moreover, according to some of the testimony, some of these girls were 14, or even 13, which is hebephilia and creeping right up n the edge of pedophelia.
And it's being excuse. That's what I thought would start to happen.
So, what we're starting to see, so that it's clear, is "yeah. . well, sure, they were jumping little teenage girls, but that's okay. . "
It's not okay.
And not only is it not okay, these people are starting to make the excuses now, without anything actually saying that Trump did that. We know of course that somebody was. . . but we don't know who.
The China Zhi Gong Party as founded in the United States in San Francisco by a pair of exiled former warlords who opposed the the Kuomintang. It remains today as one of the eight minor Chinese political parties currently permitted to exist as flunkies.
M'eh.
FBI agent Edwin C. Shanahan, was fatally shot after following a suspected car thief, Martin James Durkin, to a garage. He was the first FBI agent to die in the line of duty.
It was a bit of an immigrants take. Dunkin was an Irish American, and so was Shanahan. Cop, and cop killer, both of recent immigrant stock, a story that was not uncommon.
Dunkin was convicted and remained in prison until 1954. He died in 1981.
The Senators beat the Pirates 6 to 3 in game four of the 1925 World Series.
At Locarno delegates agreed that due consideration would be given to Germany's special military status until such time as a general arms reduction plan could be implemented across Europe. This was thought to secure Germany's entry into the League of Nations.
Discharged Air Force Technical Sergeant Leonard Matlovich appeared on the cover of Time in his Air Force Class B uniform with the words "I Am a Homosexual", for which he was discharged, on the cover. The decorated Vietnam Veteran had come out just before with his status and it seems he had not become a practicing homosexual until after the war. He'd begin a protracted legal battle with the Air Force for reinstatement, which was offered to him originally with a promise that he discontinue homosexual activities, but he declined that. At the time, an exception to the rule prohibting homosexuals in the military existed which would have allowed that. Ultimately he'd accept a financial settlement. The rule itself was removed. It'd be somewhat revived in a different form in 1993 under the Clinton Administration's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.
Matlovich was raised Catholic but had converted to Mormonism. He was subsequently excommunicated from the LDS for homosexuality. He died in 1988 at age 44 of AIDS. His actions made him a public figure in the homosexual rights movement, which was just beginning to become a thing at the time. The DSM classified homosexuality as a mental illness until 1973 and was only removed that year due to a paper published by a homosexual psychologist.
I can recall the issue of Time and it was quite shocking at the time.
Matlovich is probably largely forgotten now. The story is interesting in light of subsequent developments, mentioned in part above. Homosexuality was not expressly prohibited by military law for most of the U.S. military's history, but then homosexuality itself was not used as a term defining what it currently does until the late 19th Century. Servicemen were discharged for sodomy, without it expressly being in the military's legal code, as it was seen as a moral abomination, but not as a sort of character defining conduct. This occurred as early as the American Revolution.1 It wasn't until 1921 when it became an expressed military crime. It wasn't until World War Two however that the Service actively worked to bar homosexuals from the Service, making that policy one that had a much shorter period of being in existence than generally imagined. Interestingly a two man panel of psychologists who worked on mental profiles for enlistment just before the war did not recommend excluding homosexuals.
The prohibition was lifted in 2011.
Part of the reason that all of this is interesting is that I'd predicted that the Trump Administration would restore the prohibition on women serving in combat, which was lifted in 2013 (I don't think it should have been). So far, that has not been done, but the Administration has barred "transgendered" from serving. That frankly makes a lot of sense as a "transgendered" person cannot carry on that status without pharmaceutical assistance, something that obviously doesn't pertain to homosexuals. Anyhow, there doesn't appear to be any Trump administration move to restore the ban on homosxuals in the Service, which perhaps shows how far views have evolved on this matter. The prior Service policies clearly reflected widely held societal views.
Farmworkers in California working for Bruce Church, Inc. voted to join the United Farm Workers, in the first such instance of that occurring.
Footnotes:
1. It's been speculated on whether or not Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, the Prussian officer who introduced Prussian drill and training methods in the Army during the Revolution may have been a homosexual, although it wouldn't have been understood in that fashion at the time. There certainly seems to have been reason to suspect that and homosexual conduct was common in the Prussian and later Imperial German officer corps. That's interesting in and of itself as it was common for officers to enter the service in their mid teens and serve in consistently all male environments, which would argue for a environmental origin to the orientation.
The same is true, it might be noted, for the pre World War Two British officer corps, which was additionally impacted by the odd British education system which tended to warehouse the male children of the well off in all male boarding schools. At least a few well known British officers have been speculated about in this fashion.
In the U.S. military this environment didn't exist, and it's pretty difficult to find examples of well known servicemen who are suspected of having been homosexuals. Unlike European armies, the U.S. Army did not discourage officers from marrying, although it was often financially impossible for junior enlisted men to do so. Most U.S. officers in fact married at the usual ages, and long serving enlisted men often did as well. Getting out of the service after a single three year enlistment was common for enlisted soldiers who wanted to marry. Of course, like all armies, prostitution was rampant near U.S. Army posts, even on the frontier.
A Soldier fires an M17 handgun at targets during the Victory Week Pistol Competition, or Regional Combat Pistol Championship, June 4. The top 10% of firers at the event earned a bronze Excellence in Competition marksmanship badge. (Photo Credit: Nathan Clinebelle)
The M17 and M18 pistols, manufactured by SIG, which are versions of their P320 handgun, are really taking the heat.
They have been for awhile, but this local incident really ramped things up:
Air Force Division Grounds M18 Handguns After Airman Dies On Wyoming Base
Let's first say, anyway you look at this, this is a terrible tragedy (but see below).
But is anything really wrong with the pistol. SIG says there isn't.
SIG, or expanded Schweizerische Industrie Gesellschaft, is one of the premier firearms manufacturers in the world. In this context its party of a trade union with the German firm of J. P. Sauer und Sohn GmbH in order to work around Swiss laws that would largely prohibit the export of military weapons. SIG did export some prior to the industrial union, with the excellent Stg 57 in export variants, being a prime example, but in recent years SIG has seriously moved into the export arms market in a way that it had not before, following the well blazed trail of Mauser and Fabrique Nationale, both of which at one time occupied the stage of supplier of small arms to the world at different points.
The US was never part of that market until Robert Strange McNamara vandalized Springfield Armory and foisted the AR15 upon the military against its will. That had the impact of making the US a commercial small arms purchaser in a way that it had not been since the American Revolution, and we've paid for it every since. It's completely true that the US had purchased commercial arms prior to that, with it notably going to commercial sidearms after Colt's perfection of cap and ball revolvers, and it interestingly relied upon commercial firms for machineguns, but when Springfield Armory was around, it always had an excellent in house backup. After that, the US became entirely reliant upon civilian suppliers.
A lesson there, interestingly enough, is that to some degree being a commercial supplier of small arms to the US military has been historically a really bad deal for commercial firms. Being the manufacturer of the M1917 rifle during World War One nearly killed Remington right after the war, and relying on sales of AR15 models to the service has actually been sort of a bad economic bet for Colt. The lesson probably is that really relying on military sales to the US is risky.
The old model that Colt used, which was basically "here's what we have, it's really good, buy if you want it" is probably the best one.
Advertisement for Colt double action revolver.
And that's particularly the case as there hasn't been a single US handgun the US military has purchased since the M1873 was replaced by the M1892 which hasn't drawn criticism.
The M1892 is a nice double action revolver, but its .38 cartridge, ideal for police use, was anemic for combat, something that the Philippine Insurrection rapidly demonstrated. M1873s were brought back into service (more on that in a minute) and .45 Colt New Army's were purchased as M1982s were pulled. That was a stopgap measure until the Army could adopt an "automatic" pistol, which it did after leisurely testing in the form of the M1911.
The M1911 is a contender for greatest military handgun of all time, so its surprising that at first there were plenty of Army officers who hated it. They regarded it outright dangers as it was too easy to fire and it was found that excited cavalrymen would accidentally shoot their horses in the head during charges. Criticism of its short trigger pull lead to a new version of the pistol, the M1911A1, coming out during hit 1920s, simply to make it a bit harder to shoot, but as late as World War Two old cavalrymen were clinging to double action revolvers, which had no safeties at all, but which featured a long heavy trigger pull.
By that time the M1911 was beloved and for good reason.
The M1911 took the services all the way into the late 80s. In 1985, the Baretta M9 was chosen to replace it, when it really didn't need to be replaced. Indeed, the Army had to be forced to make a decision, which it was resisting, by Congress threatening to turn the project over to the Air Force, which had been responsible for the adoption of the AR 15. That caught Colt flat footed as even t hough they'd been the supplier of most military handguns to the military for over a century, they weren't really expecting the Army to move forward with the entire project.
There were three reasons in reality to find a new handgun. One was that no new M1911s had been purchased since the Second World War, so they were all getting internally rebuilt. New pistols needed to be ordered. The second one was tha ti was felt that the .45 ACP round was too stout for women, who now were in roles where they needed handguns. That was moronic, as women can shoot any handgun a man can. The third was that the US was foisting the 5.56 on our NATO allies and by adopting a 9mm pistol, we were throwing htem a bone, as every other NATO member save for NOrway used a 9mm pistol.
Which is something we shoudl have paused to think about right there.
The US, until after World War Two, had never been a supplier of small arms to other nations in any signficiant degree. Even after World War Two we were't a supplier of new arms, but our suprlus arms. IT wasn't until after teh Vietnam War that this changed. The big suppliers of military arms to the Western World were Germany and Belgium. The Browning designed Belgian handgun, the High Power, was to some degree the handgun of the free world. It had a proven track record.
The Baretta was a reengineerd P-38. The P-38, like the High Power, and the M1911, is a contender for greatest military handgun of all time. Given that, the M9 is a very good handgun.
US troops at first hated it.
Marines with M9s.
They hated it because they didn't want it, and soon attention was focused on breakages in the slides of the early Italian manufactured pistols. Baretta stated there was nothing wrong with the gun, and in fact, there wasn't.
It never really fully replaced the M1911, as if you really need a pistol, the M1911 wins hands down every time. But as 9mms go, it was a really good one.
Well, then came the Glock.
Glocks are frankly nothing special and a lot of real pistol aficionados do not like them. But they used a striker instead of an external hammer. There are some advantages to that, but for the most part, the advantages are more theoretical than real. Frankly, anyone carrying a striker pistol would be just as well off with a hammer fired one and never notice the difference if they actually had to use it.
Anyhow, the service determined that it needed a striker fired pistol because everyone else was getting one. Not too surprisingly, some in the service dithered on the project as it wasn't really needed, but them some senior officers who didn't know what the crap they were talking about threatened to directly procure Glocks, which would have been a horrible idea.
Tests were held and the P320 chosen.
Disclaimer here, I have one.
I have one, oddly enough, due to a Ducks Unlimited event. I didn't go out and look for one.
Having said that, it shoots extremely nicely. I can see why people like/liked them. In a heads up contest between the M9 and the M17/18, I think the SIG wins every time.
And now we have this issue.
Is it one?
I don't really know. I hope that its figured out. SIG, which also won the Army contest for new rifle (M7) and machine gun (M250), is taking piles of ill informed heat right now.
Let's take a look at the problem, some potential causes, and some fixes.
First, let's start with this.
Is there really a problem?
Sounds fantastical to even ask that, but the chatter about the SIG fits into a long US service tradition of claiming that the prior firearm was perfect and the new one plagued with flaws. Sometimes its even true, or perhaps a little true. Sometimes, it's bunk.
The history of Army handguns certain fits that, however. The Army was really long in replacing the M1873 and soldiers came to immediately hate its replacement. Was the M1892 bad? Well, not as a design, it was far more advanced than the M1873, but the cartridge really was a bad choice. The criticism was warranted.
What about the criticism of the M1911, which actually lead to it being redesigned a bit? Not hardly. The M1911 was a great pistol from day one and its defects, so to speak, were ones of perception on the part of those who were used to old heavy trigger double actions.
And the M9. Well, I'll admit that I was one of its critics. But the M9 is a really good handgun. The frame cracking was a freakish event and not something that proved to be an overall problem. The eral problem is that its a 9mm, but that doesn't have anything to do with the design itself.
And, if we expand out and look at the history of US rifles we'll find the same thing. When the M1 Garand was adopted there were some legitimate problems wtih its gas system, which lead to that being rapidly resdesigned. Still, that didn't keep pleny of critics of faulting the rifle as inferior to the M1903 and soldiers actually were very conscerned that stoppages they experienced in stateside training, which apparently were due to the ammunition being used for a time, meant the rifle was defective. Combat would rapidly prove that to be false, but it received that criticm at first.
The M14 received criticism for having some supposed problem with its bolt and action, which critics of the rifle will reference even today. One civilian produced variant supposedly featured reengingeering to address the prblem, whatever it is. It's difficult to find out hwat hte supposed problem was, and in actual use, ti seems to have been completely unnoticed. Some M14s, for that matter, featured M1 Garand lock bar rear sights which drives some competitive rifleman absolutely nuts. Anyhow, the rifle didn't have faults, but it received criticism for having them.
The M16 of course, did have real faults, and still does, all of which are attributable to its direct impingment gas system. However, the Army made the faults worse by suggesting the rifle never needed to be cleaned, wich was absurd, and by using fouling powder in early cartridge production. AR15 fans and the military seem to have gotten largely over this, but at first the rifle was really hated, and I'll admit that I didn't like it.
The point is that there might not be anything wrong with the M17 at all. What we could be seeing is an element of operator error.
Something about the entire "it discharged all on its owned from its holster" story sounded like a fable.
I started this post before the news above broke, but I kept expecting something like this. Frankly, murder or manslaughter wasn't what I was expecting, but some sort of operator error, or I'll confess suicide.
But here's the deal, once something gets a bit of a bad wrap in American society, particularly litigious American society, it's hard to unring the bell on the story.
And the story here, dare we say it, involves a lot of service users. . . .
Now ,why would that be significant?
Well, frankly, because service users are amongst those who are the least likely to be paying attention to what they're doing and screw up. Being in the Armed Forces or a police department doesn't make you a gun fan. It doesn't even really make you all that knowledgeable on weapons, quite frankly.
SIG might be right. There might be no problem here at all.
And if there is one, it might be an introduced one. That is, users messing with their sidearm accidentally or intentionally. Some police forces actually issue sidearms just to keep their policemen from doing that with firearms they own.
But let's assume there is a problem. What would it be?
The M17 features a really complicated striker design and the pistol was designed not to have a safety. Those two things alone may mean that the design has been somewhat compromised by complication and the addition of a safety it wasn't designed to have. That might, somehow, be defeated the need for a trigger "command". It's important to note that if the pistols are firing on their own, they're defeating the safety, but then the safety only prevents the trigger from being pulled.
That is, I'd note, a much less effective safety design than that on the M1911, but we'll get back to that.
Anyhow, the safety isn't going to stop block the striker. It doesn't work, say, like the safety on a M1903 or G98, which does. It just keeps the trigger from being accidentally pulled.
Another possibility is that something about the holsters is playing a weird role It seems unlikely, but its not completely impossible.
If I were a SIG engineer, and I'm not an engineer at all, I'd look at trying to develop a safety that hold the striker, if possible, and it might not be.
Okay, let's assume that it's all just hopeless, there's something wrong with the SIG and it can't be fixed. I'm not saying that's the case, but what if there is. Clearly a different handgun is in order.
Some have suggested just going back to the M9, and that's not a bad idea. The problem might be that after decades of use most of the M9s are in rough shape. I doubt that, but it's possible.
Well, so what. Just sort through the ones in the inventory and weed out those in bad shape. Issue the ones that aren't, and adopt the newest variant of the M9, which is nearly universally regarded as a very fine weapon.
The only reason not to do that is it has a hammer.
M'eh.
The other possibility. . . oh my. . .dare we say it. . . is to bring back the M1911.
Marine Corps MEU-SOC, the M1911 that proceeded the M45.
There's no reason not to, and in fact the Marine Corps did for awhile. There's nothing the M17/18 and M9 can do that the M1911 doesn't do better.
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