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.
Sydney Sweeney in American Eagle denim, part of the ad campaign causing all the furor. The outfit itself is very 1970s retro, which is more than a little ironic in context. Given the commentary, this is posted with the fair use exception.
Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color. My jeans are blue.
Sydney Sweeney in American Eagle ad.
Sydney Sweeney's American Eagle ad shows a cultural shift toward whiteness.
CNBC headline.
Q: Your administration has been very open about the fact that American women are not having enough babies. There was an ad this week. Sydney Sweeney, an actress, was in an ad for Blue Jeans. Does America need to see more ads like that? And maybe fewer ads with people like Dylan Mulvaney on the cover?
Rob Finnerty in an interview of Donald Trump.
First, let us state something plainly.
Sydney Sweeney is hot.
Way hot.
And she looks good in the American Eagle Jeans, which are sort of retro 1970s denim really.
Really good.
So why are people having a fit?
Well, it's a really interesting tour through the culture, really.
Using attractive women to sell clothing is nothing new. Shoot, using attractive women to sell anything, is in fact not new.
So what's the big deal.
Basically, when you get right down to it, the big deal is two things. First of all, Sweeney is white. Secondly, this is a return to an obvious sex sells approach to selling that we haven't seen since the early 1990s.
The peak of the sex sells approach was really the 1970s. Coincident with the rise of feminism was the absolute exploitation of women in advertising. Calvin Klein really went to town with Brooke Shields, who was sexualized so young in her career that her image, in the movie industry, was basically a near example of child pornography. But in advertising, he wasn't the only one. There were in fact advertisements that would outright shock most Americans now as they used young teenage girls in sexualized poses. It was repulsive.
That seemed to have run its course by the mid 1980s, but even then, in the 1990s, Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith modeled jeans, in her case Guess jeans.
The 90s, however, also saw the really fruity elements of the American come into cultural power, and a lot of that gave us, unfortunately, what we have today in terms of a massive right wing populist reaction. In modeling, left wing media masters insisted that models not be, if possible, smoking hot young women and that instead they should be culturally diverse, and in some cases, fat.
Now comes this, in the midst of a real swing to cultural conservatism, but not culturalism of the Patrick Dineen type, but of the Dukes of Hazzard fan type.
What Sweeney said, quite frankly, is actually completely true. Genes are passed down from parents to offspring. Genes in fact determine external traits like hair color and eye color. That is a fact.
And, more than we like to admit, they determine a massive amount of our personality traits. If you hang around a family gathering and don't find people who have the same deep interests as you do, the same sense of humor, etc., you might wish to check to see if you are in the right place. Sure, some of that might be due to environment, you are all from the same family, but some not. It's well known that many of the traits that impact our personalities are in fact genetic.
So what's up with the upset.
Well she's white, as are 60.5% of the American population. That is who you are trying to sell to much of the time. The liberal left just can't have that.
If the same clothing promotion was being done by Anok Yai, the left wouldn't be having a fit, the right would be, and for the exact same reason.
Which is exactly why, if I ran American Eagle, I'd have Anok Yai join in the campaign.
Of course, that isn't the only reason people are enjoying being upset. They're also upset as the ads openly focus on Sweeney's assets, including having the camera in the jean jacket ad focus on her boobs until she intervenes to instruct the viewer to look at her face.
Well, gentle reader, that portrays reality. All the feminist reactions in the world are never going to stop men from observing cleavage when its right there. We're wired that way, and for a reason.
Which brings us to the next point. In the right wing defense, Trump, in a friendly Fox interview, was asked the bizarre question "Does America need to see more ads like that? And maybe fewer ads with people like Dylan Mulvaney on the cover?" after the pronatalist views of the far right were referenced.
That was weird.
The US, and for that matter the entire Western World, does not have a demographic crisis like the far right pronatalist like to imagine. But the suggestion that men are going to look at Sydney Sweeney and suddenly feel aroused and go out and procreate is truly odd.
But even this does give us a glimpse into how modern Western society has really gone off the rails No man who wants to "transition" is ever going to look like Sydney Sweeney. Nor will any of them suffer from the Girl Flu every month. That's reality.
The reason that late procurer Jeffrey Epstein remains in the news is that the Republicans made the "Epstein files" a big deal.
That's the only reason.
I don't believe that Trump had Epstein murdered. I don't believe the really bizarre conspiracy theory that the Clintons did either. Even at the time that was asserted, however, I thought that it made a lot more sense that Trump would have offed Epstein than the Clintons, but I don't believe that either happened.
Epstein and Trump knew each other, and that association (I don't know if Trump has any actual friends at all, I somewhat doubt it) was more than casual. Epstein claimed to know that Trump liked to screw the wives of Trump's "friends" and that he first had carnal knowledge of Melania aboard the Lolita Express. At least based on what is out there, Epstein never claimed that Trump dabbled with the underaged. Trump did claim that Epstein like women "on the younger side", which can mean a variety of things. Author Michael Wolff claimed that Epstein claimed he had photos of Trump with topless "young women" sitting on his lap, which again doesn't mean they were underaged.
There have been, however, some accusations, and that's what they are, accusations, that went beyond that. "Katie Johnson" claimed that she was raped by Trump in association with Epstein. Was she? How would we know, the suits were never advanced, and the allegations are so extreme that there's plenty of reason to question them.
And other women claimed they were abused by Trump, while teenagers, on Epstein's island.
But still, all of this may just prove what we already know. Trump can be proven to be a creep, but that doesn't mean he's a pedophile, if the women's claims are disregarded (which generally, we tend not to do with accusatrices).
Having said that, there's the smoke and fire matter. People related rumors about the Hefner mansion for years before the full truth of its horrors were told after his death. Hefner was a rapist, under the current definition, based on what one of his female house guests related to have witnesses in terms of compelled sex. James Brown was violent towards women there. Bill Cosby, who turned out to be a rapist, frequented it.
Can you really have an island dedicated to sexual trafficking and not descend into rape? Can you really circluate underaged girls and not have them compelled into sex?
During Biden's administration, the populist far right, which got ahead of Trump in its conspiracy theories, whipped itself into a frenzy with the belief that Democrats were a secret cabal of pedophiles, and that the Epstein Files would reveal a vast number of important Democrats who were involved . As soon as the files were released, we were told, the lid was going to be off this horrific discovery. Trumpite figures adopted releasing the Epstein files as one of the things they were going to do.
After the election, Pam Bondi did in fact release part of the FBI files on Epstein, which is seemingly now forgotten even by Bondi. She claimed she had an Epstein client list on her desk that she was reviewing, with the information set to be released.
Now the list is lost, or maybe never existed.
Hmmm. . .
Well, if a list existed, it's being hidden, and given the way the Trumpites approached this, there's real reason to wonder why. They cried for the information, it didn't get released if there was a list, and it should be. Is it lost?
If it is, how did that happen?
We're also told a list never existed, and it might not have. That would have been smart for Epstein, and Epstein was no dummy. How much of a list would he have needed?
Well, maybe some sort of list. Knowing the high rollers being supplied with teenage girls would, I suppose, perhaps be easy enough, but you'd think you'd write this stuff down for self protection if nothing else.
All of which fuels more conspiracy theories.
Chances are there was no client list. Epstein probably packed a list of perverts around in his head. Probably most of the girls he supplied were young, but not underaged, probably.
But now, we'll never really know.
What we do know is that somebody was lying. Bondi, for example, either had a list and "lost" it, or she never had one. Others who suggested there was all sorts of smoking gun material that would come to light, if they didn't lie, were in the neighborhood of lies.
But then, Trump has lied so often that people have become numb to it.
Gary Hart had to drop out of the 1988 Presidential election when an affair he engaged in, involving a boat called Monkey Business, came to light.
The prototype for the modern Jeep, basically, it entered civilian use as the CJ5, after entering military use in 1952. Doubtless examples are still in use, and civilians varians are still produced by Roxor in India.
The M151 "Mutt" entered service in 1959 and carried on into the 1990s. It had fantastic off road capabilities, and was also fantastically dangerous, given its independent wheel suspension system.
The last Jeep to see general use in the U.S. military, it was replaced by HumVeh's, although speciality vehicles, and even modern commercial Jeeps, continue to see some use. In these examples, the radio mount for a period radio is displayed.
I personally have a lot of experience from the 1980s, with both the M151, and this model of military radio.
The M60 was the great U.S. tank of the Cold War, and continues to be a great tank to this day.
Effectively an improved variant of the M48, so much so that in some armies it would be regarded as a variant of the prior tank, the M60 took all of the improvements to the M26 line of tanks over the decades and more or less perfected them. Indeed, some of the improvements, such as the 105mm gun, were retrofitted to the prior M48.
M60s remain in use around the world in upgraded versions.
The fourth tank to descend from the M26 Pershing, including the Pershing, the M48 was a long serving and very successful U.S. tank. It entered service in the mid 1952 in the U.S. Army, and it is still in service with various nations, including South Korea and Taiwan.
The M48 was the second of the US Cold War tanks to actually see action in a Cold War war, the M46 being the first in Korea, with the M48 seeing extensive use by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps in Vietnam. The tank was already a second class tank in the US military by that time, the M60 having come on, but it was a perfectly modern tank and more than able to take on anything in theater. The tank was later upgraded to near M60 capabilities with the change from a 90mm gun to a 105.
The M48 entered US service in 1952, and was last used in the National Guard in 1987.
And now, of course, the following from my visit to the National Museum of Military Vehilces.
UH-1 "Huey", a helicopter synonymous with the Vietnam War.
Hueys came into use in a major way during the war, and remained in use for many years thereafter. They were still the predominant helicopter when I was a National Guardsmen in the 1980s, and even now I'll occasionally see an Air Force example in Cheyenne in operation.
They remain one of the greatest helicopters of all time.
I wasn't even aware of the M-422's existence as a actual service item. I've seen them on a television series from the 60s and assumed they were just a studio item substituting for a real Jeep. Offhand, I think that was from The Lieutenant which only had one run, that being in 1963.
Gun trucks, depicted here, were a Vietnam War thing adn were produced in theater.
The "Gamma Goat", an incredibly unstable vehicle. One of the guys I was in basic training with was latter killed in a Gamma Goat roll over.
The M151 Jeep. Also very unstable, but long serving. It was the last 1/4 general purpose truck of the US Army used on a widescale basis.
M109 howitzer. I trained on one of these at Ft. Sill, where I had the "No 1" position on the gun. A much updated version is still in service.