Thursday, March 29, 1973. Collapse.

Today In Wyoming's History: March 29: 1973  The United States completes it's withdrawal from Vietnam.

U.S. Army General Frederick C. Weyand, for the U.S. forces, stated: "Our mission has been accomplished," 

General Cao Văn Viên, for South Vietnam, stated to the departing U.S. troops: "We are going to do everything we can to see that your great sacrifices were not in vain."

The sentiments were no doubt sincere, but the mission had not really been accomplished and the sacrifices would have to be qualified.  We took a look at the war in that fashion here:

Looking at the Vietnam War differently. Not a war, but as a campaign in the Cold War.

General Cao would go into exile in 1975 with the fall of South Vietnam, and died in 2008 at age 86 in the United States.  Gen. Weyland died in 2010 at age 93.

The war effectively destroyed the combat capabilities through moral decay of the U.S. Army and the U.S. Navy. The Marines and the Air Force came through it much less impaired.  The lessons learned caused the post Vietnam War military to abandon conscription, something it had relied upon since 1940, and a wholesale return to the pre World War Two volunteer/National Guard based force, something that has been a success.  It would take several years for the Army and Navy to return to combat effective, but it happened much quicker, with the volunteer force, than might have been guessed.  By the early 1980s, the service had been effectively restored and the damaging impacts of the Vietnam War largely put behind it.

The war would have a lingering effect on the military in other ways, of course, perhaps one of the most visual being the adoption of the M16 to such an extent that it has obtained record longevity, in spite of being a widely hated weapon by troops of the era.

Blog mirror item:

60 Days, 50 Years Ago

On the same day:

Today In Wyoming's History: March 29 By odd coincidence, this is also the day that Lt. William Calley was sentenced in 1971 in a courts-martial for his role in the My Lai Massacre, although his prison sentence ended up not being a long one.

Also on that day, the second to last group of US POWs left Vietnam.  The last POW to board the aircraft out of North Vietnam was U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Alfred H. Agnew.

Somehow oddly emphasizing the spirit of defeat at the time, the well regarded television drama Pueblo, about the North Korean capture of the USS Pueblo, aired on television.  Only tangentially related to the war, it was impossible not to notice that North Korea of that era felt that the US was so impaired that it could get away with this, which it did. 

It would not, now.

And making the day all the worse, President Nixon set a maximum for prices that could be charged for beef, pork and lamb.  This was in reaction to a consumer revolt in which consumers, mostly housewives charged with home economics, to boycott the same in reaction to rising prices.

Oddly, of course, this is the day that rationing had commenced on the same items in 1943.

You'd think that I'd remember some of this, but I don't on a personal level.

Days of Rage*

Sidewalk in Houston, Texas.

Ostensibly it started with the death of George Floyd on May 25.

The New York Times has put together a really excellent synopsis of what occured resulting in Floyd's death from the security camera of a Chinese restaurant.

Floyd was arrested by police officers for allegedly using a counterfeit $20.00 bill for the purchase of a pack of cigarettes.  The encounter started off when store clerks, two very young men, one African American and one Asian American (I think) discovered what they thought was an illegal use of counterfeit cash and walked across the street to confront Floyd and a companion, who remained parked across the street. They wanted the cigarettes back but had no luck, so they went back to the store and called it in as a theft.  They also reported Floyd as trunk and not in control of himself.  Floyd, originally from Houston, Texas, was a very large man who at age 46 was a recently laid off bouncer. 

Police shortly arrived and when they did, one of them pulled his sidearm for some reason and ordered Floyd to place his hands on the steering wheel of his car.  He shortly re-holstered the sidearm but then pulled Floyd from the car, which was filmed by a man who was sitting in his car immediately behind Floyd's (something that frankly would have entailed some risk to that person under the circumstances).  That person soon left, or was made to move.

At that point, however things seemed to be in control. Footage of Floyd shows that he probably was drunk and was very distressed.  Officers had no problem in leading the stumbling Floyd up to the wall of the Chinese restaurant where they sat him down without incident. They then moved him to their police car across the street where he stumbled and fell right as a second police car arrived.  By that time, Floyd was complaining of being claustrophobic and not wanting to enter the police car.

As this occurred, the third police vehicle arrived. That one was carrying officer Derek Chauvin and officer Tou Thao.

Before we move on, we should say something about these officers as this entire matter has descended into a type of racial confrontation.  Thoa is obviously Asian American.  More particularly, however, his is Hmong by ethnicity, although American born.  The Hmong are an Asian people who began a southward migration after the Battle of Zhuolu in 2500 BC. They kept moving south into Southeast Asia up into modern times when, as a result of the Vietnam War, they entered the United States as refugees.  They've located, as refugees, in the upper Midwest where, like is typical for many immigrant groups in the first generation of migration, they've been associated with gang activity.**   Thao had six complaints that had been previously been lodged against him and one lawsuit for brutality.  I'm not making any assumptions on any of this, as I really know nothing other than what I've read.  Mostly, because the Hmong are on an American integration track that African Americans have been slow to benefit from, its interesting for that reason.  We'll discuss that more below.

The focus of so much attention, Derek Chauvin, had previously been involved in seventeen complaints and three shootings, one of which was fatal. Again, I don't know anything about any of this, so I'm not commenting on it.

Chauvin became involved in the effort to get Floyd into the car and, for some reason, ended up pulling him out of the car while Thao watched.  Three officers actually held Floyd down, who was obviously completed incapacitated at this time.  Chauvin had his knee on Floyd's neck, and Chauvin was also a large man.  Floyd begins to complain he can't breath and this goes on for a long time.  At least one woman from the gathering crowed attempts to intervene, with another warning her that hte policemen have mace.

The whole thing is shocking.

I just watched this for the first time when I started to type this out, which is June 1, 2020.  Living a long way from Minneapolis, and coming at a time when I was largely absent from the news, it wasn't something I was up on at the time.

Rioting has followed.

We should be frankly, the rioting is basically of three characters, one is an expression of rage, one is an expression of virtue signaling, and the third is opportunism.  Protesting, as opposed to rioting, is likewise of three characters, those being rage, support, and virtue signaling.  I suppose there may been an opportunistic element to it as well.

We'll deal with rage.

We're not going to attempt to condone rioting violence as some have done.  Violence is violence and we don't condone it.  We don't condone violence of any kind except in self defense, although on that we take a broad view.  Not so broad of view, however, that we license the use of it in some ways that a lot of Americans typically do.  The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example, receive no sanction here. They were murders.  They were murders that have nothing to do with this story, but we note that as we want to make clear where we're coming from.

And with that, we'll now skip the riots themselves in terms of what's occurring, for the time being.

The rage expressed is a latent rage over the American failure to deal with the byproducts of a unique form of racism that commenced 400 years ago last year with the introduction of slavery into the New World.

Slavery wasn't new, of course, as some like to point out, but quite frankly race based slavery was new and in1619 when it was introduced into the New World it was a reintroduction of it.  Slavery had gone away in the intervening years following the collapse of the Roman Empire.  It hadn't gone way all at once.  The Saxons, for example, still held slaves when the Normans invaded England in 1066, something the Normans were horrified by.  But by and large, and well prior to 1066, slavery had left Europe.

It had left due to Christianity, contrary to the snarky "the Bible sanctions slavery" comments sometimes made by the historically and religiously ignorant.  In fact, the Bible never sanctioned slavery and the mentions of it with specificity in the Old Testament were restraints on it, with slavery having been a nearly universally practiced "institution" in the world at that time.  Unlike other peoples, the Jews were strictly enjoined on what they could and could not do with slaves in an era in which slaves and servants were so synonymous that the word for them was the same.  As that would indicate, most slaves at that time fit into a fine distinction between being really bonded and being held as servants and were of the same ethnicity, usually, in the case of the Jews, as those who held them.  This wasn't always the case, of course.  Hagar, for example, was Egyptian.

The other type of slavery was around at the time to be sure, and the Jews were of course taken into slavery en masse more than once. That sort of slavery, however, was pretty much enjoined by the Bible in regards to the Jews.  An exception can be found in the instance of the wives of enemy warriors killed in battle, but the example proves the rule.  The taking of enemy women was the norm in the world at the time, but in the Jewish instance those taken had to be married to their captor who was subject to such a set of requirements as to the widow that only the most smitten would every have bothered to attempt it, including allowing the unfortunate woman to mourn for the loss of her first husband.

In early Christian times, therefore, the institution was clearly on the way out, something that is probably exemplified by the examples you can find of early Christian saints in which you can find two members of the same household, one bound and one free, both going into martyrdom together, with in one instance three such people going to their deaths, a woman, her slave, and an infant, all together.  Those instances indicate the evolution of slaves into servants, which is not to say that slaves resulting from wars and put to hard labor were also not common at the time. By the Middle Ages, however, it was very uncommon in Christendom.  Indeed, by that time it was the province of the Vikings, who took slaves in raids, which was one of the reasons they were regarded with horror, and of the Islamic Arabs, who developed slave raiding into an economic enterprise.

It's there that we circle back around to the horror story of American racism, as the Islamic Arabs were distinctly different than Christians in this regard.  Christians looked down on bondage in general and in the case of sex regarded, and still regard, sex between unmarried couples as completely illicit.  Indeed, Christians regarded from the very first instance that marriage required the full consent of both parties, man and woman, or no valid marriage existed.  Muslims, however, didn't regard this to be the case in the same way.  Marriage, in Islam, required consent, but Mohammed had licensed forced sex with slave women during his rise and this resulted in a slave industry in Muslim lands that was based on labor, as slavery was sanctioned, and on sex.  By Christian terms this involved, of course, rape, but in Muslim terms, it did not.

The Arabs therefore developed an extensive slave trading enterprise based on the capture of slaves, for labor and forced sex.  It spread throughout northern Africa but it also spread to the Mediterranean and even the Atlantic as Arab raiders took human prizes for those purposes. The only real requirement was that they couldn't take Muslim prisoners and Arab men, and of course it was limited to men, couldn't hold Muslim women as sex slaves.  Holding Irish women, for example, or holding black African women who were not Muslim, was perfectly allowable.

By the time the Portuguese started colonizing the West African coast an extensive slave trade, based on a person's religious affiliation, was going on, and fueled in part by the evil of war.  Slaves were often captured locally and, and often in war, and then traded to Arab slave traders, who sold them on in other places, often in their own domains. The Portuguese stepped into this evil and joined right in, in spite of their Christian background.  Hence the exportation of slaves to the New World commenced.  

The reintroduction of slavery was notably concentrated by Europeans in their new domains, although it was not actually limited to it. Still, the avoidance of reintroducing the evil in their native lands was no doubt in part because it was an obvious evil that would have called into question the fundamental nature of those societies and what they claimed to be about.

By that time Europeans were involved in a wholescale global colonial effort.  We're not going to go into that in depth and we're not going to get preachy about that, as is so often the case on this topic. Yes, Europeans were attempting to extend their rule over foreign people's everywhere, but in fact everyone everywhere was also attempting to do that. While nationalism as we understand it, contrary to the common historical assertion, has always existed, in the 17th Century it was also commonly accepted that one sovereign could rule over a wide group of peoples and no nation thought much about extending its power over the weaker nations, including for economic reasons.  Nothing in that excuses slavery, but if we are going to step back and also condemn colonialism in the period we'll be in the position of condemning people for something that they would not have grasped as wrong.  Indeed, one feature of European colonial extension into other areas of the globe is that their colonial enterprises sometimes ended up smacking up against those of the people they were attempting to colonize, making their contests ones of one empire against another.

If people, globally, of the day would not have thought of colonialism as being wrong, they knew better about slavery.  Indeed, in order to engage in it, they had to rationalize it.

That hadn't been the case with slavery of antiquity.  This is not to say that such slavery was nice in any fashion, but the thin resources of the day gave it an economic nature that was distinctly different from later eras.  As noted above, the distinction between conventional slaves and servants had been slight, and as an important feature of that, they were usually of the same culture.  The exception was for what essentially amounted to prisoners of war, for whom there was no other easy way to hold them.  It's important to note, however that there were exceptions that were ethnicity based, as when entire peoples were carried into slavery.

That hadn't occurred for millenai in European terms and therefore the reintroduction of slavery was not only new, it was uniquely malignant.  It was based on ethnicity, which came to be seen rapidly as based on "race". The thin excuse was a gradient from African slaves being very primitive people in the eyes of Europeans who would somehow benefit from their captivity to their just being inferior or even sort of subhuman.

It's that categorization that lives on with us today in the form of a racism and economic legacy that has kept African Americans from sharing the story of other immigrants to North America.  Only Indians somewhat otherwise share that story, although theirs is uniquely different in some ways.

Racism justified keeping blacks as slaves and economics fueled it, making it a doubly sinful enterprise based on failing to love your neighbor and loving money over all else.  That evil was recognized as such well before the American Revolution and in fact slavery was passing away in the north by that time. At the time of the country declaring its independence from England it was expected that slavery would pass away in the south as well, but economics kept that from occurring, placing the overwhelming bulk of American blacks in unending bondage.  A growing realization of the evil of slavery resulted in the Civil War (there was no other cause but that in spite of what Confederate apologist may maintain today), and to the nation's credit thousands died to free the slaves. Thousands also died in a disreputable and evil effort to keep their fellow men slaves as well, of course.

Following the Civil War economics eventually triumphed over justice and an early effort to appropriate lands from slaveholders and issue them back out to former slaves on a 40 acre standard American farming model failed.  Soon the nation turned its back on the former slaves figuring it had done enough just to free them.  In the early 20th Century blacks began to abandon the south in the Great Migration and spread throughout the country in an effort to improve their lot, but the south remained the locality where the black population was the highest and most deprived.  It wasn't until World War One when there were serious efforts to address the ongoing discrimination and poverty of African Americans and blacks enlisting in the US armed forces at the time thought of their services as a full step into equality, which it proved not to be.  It was the introduction, however that even the Red Summer of 1919 couldn't reverse.  It would have been logical if World War Two would have built on what came before in the 1910s and 1920s, and it did in some ways, but it wasn't until the Truman Administration that the ongoing legal institutions that kept blacks impoverished and separate began to come rapidly down.

From 1948 through the early 1970s the Federal Government worked diligently to dismantle the laws that burdened blacks, aided by a United States Supreme Court that made use of Reconstruction Era laws for the first time in a century.  But, significant to our story here, it's important to realize that blacks in the south did not achieve legal equality until well within the lifetimes of the current President and his Democratic contender.  For that matter, slavery's passing was not even a century old at the time of their births.  Put another way, more time has passed between World War One and today than between the births of Joe Biden and Donald Trump and the end of slavery.  There were men and women still alive who had been born into slavery when they were born (and when I was born).

The burden of slavery would be hard to overcome in just a century's time but the legal institutions that were erected in the south after the failure of Reconstruction created a near slavery sort of economic status for blacks, dooming them to certain types of work and poor educations. Those conditions fueled the Great Migration but they also meant that the majority of blacks lived their entire lives in deprived conditions. This only began to change for those remaining in the south in the 1940s and it really got rolling in the 1960s.    This means that most of the improvement in the economic lives of blacks has only come since World War Two, and the strong prejudices that allowed that to be the case lived on openly well into the 1970s.  That's not long ago.  It effectively means that George Floyd was born in an era when expressing prejudice of that type was acceptable in the region in which he was born.

The Civil Rights era of the 1960s is looked back as the golden era, in some ways of civil rights efforts for African Americans.  It's easy to forget that there was widespread opposition to the efforts and openly opposing them was not socially unacceptable.  Lyndon Johnson went to the dedication of Stone Mountain in 1970, for example, an event honoring Confederate leadership in a fashion that would never be condoned today.  The situation for blacks has improved massively since 1970.

But as is often the case, the law of unintended consequences has plagued them as well.  The elimination of legal barriers raised the fortunes of all African Americans but it improved the lives of middle class and nearly middle class blacks the most, who migrated out of the ghettos where they had been previously concentrated. That pattern followed that laid out by all prior American immigrant minorities.  It had the accidental consequence of concentrating poverty in those same areas, whereas prior to that there had been a range of economic classes in them.  Farming policies of the Great Depression wiped out black farming in the south duringthe 1930s, eliminating a long standing black class there.  Experimental liberal social policies in the 1960s and 1970s foreshadowed efforts towards a Universal Basic Income and had predictable and disastrous effects of the African American poor whose social structures were weak due to the legacy of slavery.***This had the impact of concentrating poverty further.  

It also meant that blacks didn't universally follow the path of prior immigrant groups, something that was further the case due to ongoing racism.  Prior groups had generally reached a day in which wholescale migration over to the middle class occured and the ethnic character of the group started to dissolve.  

People may claim to be Irish Americans or Italian Americans today, for example, without even grasping what that meant a century ago.  In 1920, if a person was an Irish American, nearly everything about them culturally and economically was made obvious just by stating that status. Today it may mean nothing more than a person having corned beef on St. Patrick's Day.  As that status changed in the country it meant not only that people moved economically up, but it also meant that they moved into other groups, regions, and ethnicities.  People claiming, for example, to be Italian Americans today are nearly as likely to be descended from English immigrants than Italian ones, due to marriages outside of the declared ethnicity.

All of this is much less true for African Americans.  The absurd "one drop" rule means that children of mixed unions are regarded as black, which is nothing more than pigmentation in biological terms.  Mix marriages and other unions have only become common very, very recently.

They have now become common, however, which is a signal that, in spite of what we're now enduring, we may actually be at that moment at which African Americans finally cross over to just being Americans.  Within the last few years advertising, a mirror reflected back on American beliefs, has gone from introducing black actors in advertisements to mixed couples.  This is now common and hardly anyone notices. As recently as a decade ago this would have sparked some controversy and in the 1970s it would have cost the advertiser revenue. The fact that television viewers think nothing of a white husband and a black wife, or vice versa, is really revolutionary.

As is, of course, the fact that we've had a black President.

The Civil Rights effort of the 1960s was reflected back on the country in strife in the 1970s.  If we think of the south resisting integration in the 1960s we're recalling that correctly, but we're also forgetting that Dixiecrats and the like were really a thing of the 1970s.  Southern Rock bands started flying the Stars and Bars in that decade, not before, and when Lynrd Skynrd sang about Wallace in Sweet Home Alabama, it was 1974.  That song remains popular today without anyone seemingly pausing to think that it was a "we'll get around to it" reaction to Southern Man.  Given that, the massive reaction to Barack Obama during his presidency is perhaps not too surprising, as for some there was a racist element to that reaction (but certainly not one on the party of everyone who disliked him as President).  That some of that remains during the Presidency of Donald Trump is accordingly not surprising.

None of which means that the nation should just sit on its hands as everything is going to be okay.  There remain real problems for black Americans, and Indian Americans, that other people don't face.  Part of that is racism, but part of that is poverty which in turn allows the racism to continue. Racist find support for their racism in the fact that blacks remain poor and their social institutions were so badly damaged by well-meaning but poorly thought out programs form the 1960s.  And that's a problem the nation can't ignore.

Much of that problem is simply economic, and curing the economic problem would cure a lot of ills.  But the nation has not only failed to address the economic problems of African Americans, and Indians, its worked to make them much worse.  Entering into the work place and rising up remains a problem for poor blacks who are concentrated by location, and who face stout competition from high immigrant populations that have strong social cohesion and who face less prejudice.  They are well aware of that.

And they're also likely to know that these problems are deeply ingrained and are going to be ignored.  The Democratic Party, which claims the support of most blacks, is unlikely to do anything in real terms to aid them and has turned its attention instead to new immigrant populations which it feels are more likely to provide its base, rightly or wrongly, in the future.  To say that the Democrats have no interest in rural blacks would be an understatement, but it also has little interest in doing anything concrete for urban blacks either.  Indeed, since the 2000s the Democratic Party has often taken positions that are offensive to the views of the majority of African Americans and taken the view that blacks had to support them as blacks have nowhere else to go. And they do largely have nowhere else to go as the GOP has had no concrete position towards blacks since the 1980s.

And so the rage is understandable.

Unfortunately, it is not likely to be helpful to anyone.  Riots of the 1960s gave rise to the "law and order" campaign of Richard Nixon, something not regarded as a bright spot in the nation's history now.  And the co-opting of genuine movements in the 1960s by the hardcore left brought them disrepute in later years.  Indeed, it can be argued that hardcore left insertion in the movements of the left, something that has never really stopped, doomed their effectiveness and further brought to an end the active Civil Rights movement of the 60s.  Put another way, while the difference between Martin Luther King, Jr., and Abby Hoffman are obvious to anyone who is paying attention, a lot of people just aren't paying attention.

And that seems to be sort of rapidly playing out now.  A lot of the protesters we see at events now are likely not really motivated by the plight of African Americans so much as they are something else, somethings innocent, somethings opportunistic, and somethings radical.  And amazingly at the same time we have a President who seems to be fanning the flames by his statements.

And so we can wonder what will occur.  What probably won't occur, no matter what, is a Richard Stroud like program designed to specifically aid the economic progress of African Americans, nor any attention to repairing the damage to black social institutions that were destroyed by the programs of the 1960s and 1970s.  Democrats have no real interest in taking that on, and Republicans aren't likely to be specifically focused on doing so.

________________________________________________________________________

*This refers to a series of 1969 protests, but the title seemed applicable here.

**The movie Gran Torino may have brought the urban American Hmong into familiarity with Americans as a group.

On gang activity, almost every post mid-19th Century American immigrant ethnicity has had gang activity in its early stages. An exception may exist for Japanese and Korean immigrants, but that would be pretty much it.  After the cultures begin to rise, with police work a typical early introduction into the middle class, this almost always fades away.  Irish, Italian, Jewish, among other, ethnicities have all been associated with criminal gangs at one point.

***African American social structures were deeply impacted by the fact that for the first 300 years of their presence in North America a black slave could be sold at any time.  Therefore, much of what other people regard as permanent was not equally the case for blacks in spite of often heroic measures to make it so.  Black couples would sometimes seek  and gain permission to travel long distances simply to visit each other, for example.  Nonetheless, with spouses and children libel to be traded away by slave holders at any time, everything was tenuous and that had to be accepted by the people so afflicted in order to endure it.

The Chemical News: "New Study Links Birth Control Pill to Brain Differences, but Don't Panic", "Breast Cancer Warning Tied To Hair Dye", "Hair Dyes and Straighteners May Raise Breast Cancer Risk for Black Women". Go ahead and panic.

The headlines counsel not to panic.

Well of course they do.

Panic is nature's way of getting you the heck of the way out of some terrible danger.  You are Captain Willard on an improbable mission into Camboida and the tiger comes through the jungle. . . you are in the velt when an African elephant spies you and charges full on aiming to squish you. . . you forgot to study for that exam that's scheduled 30 minutes from now.

Yes, panic.

And by panicking, concentrate your focus on that bad thing and avoid it.

But then, if you panic here, you may change your lifestyle in a truly revolutionary way that will be bad for somebody's pocketbook and may require you to make inconvenient life choices, opting for a natural, which doesn't just involve buying cabbage at the farmer's market.

Yup.

A long time ago on this blog, I posted a topic called We like everything to be natural . . . except for us.  That post, like a lot of posts here, was pretty wide ranging.  But part of what it noted was this:

 Chilean couple, 1940, no doubt a lot more natural than "all natural" folks today, in every sense.

In our world today, westerners (residents of Europe and North America) are huge on things being "all natural".  It's the rage, and it doesn't appear to be going away any time soon.  And I'm not really criticizing it, as my agrarian leanings make me sympathetic, when its done in the messy, bloody, muddy way of actual nature.  I'm not so sympathetic with the fanciful fake natural way that some who fear real nature would have it.

So, in this era of all natural, we have "natural" organic foods of all types.  Natural organic oatmeal (maybe even better if from Ireland and cut with steel), organic vegetables, grass fed beef.  You name it.

Indeed, entire sections of the European and North American populations are at war with any genetically altered foods of any kind, although it must be noted in fairness that nearly every food we eat was selectively bred that way so as to alter it from its original form, save for people who eat fairly primitive foods and hunt and fish.  Indeed, ironically for some of these folks, our meat sources tend to be much less genetically altered by selective breeding than our plant foods.  Cows, for example, differ little from aurochs.

 

Frequently satirical copied World War Two era poster.  Presenting an idealistic image, the mother and daughter in fact represent Americans who were a lot more "natural" than nearly any living today.

People have taken this one step further and now, in some hip circles, want their foods to be produced all locally.  Again, I'm not criticizing that.  I have some sympathy for it, being a fan of systems and realizing how odd some of our food production chain actually is.   I used to grow a big garden myself, and miss doing so, which sort of taps into this.

And we have all natural concerns expressing themselves in clothing.  I know of people who will only wear "all natural fibers".  Not liking synthetics much, I trend that way, although I do like the storm proof hoodies that are now out there, which make for great winter insulation.

Some folks, however, have gone even one step further there, and insist that their fibers, if plant derived, also be organic, out of an apparent concern for the environment.

All really big in Europe and North America, particularly with the upper class, the upper middle class, and the university crowd.

And then it went on to pose this question:

So why don't we apply it to ourselves?

And then it went on to address some of the very headlines addressed below, although some certainly weren't.

First, one that was:

New Study Links Birth Control Pill to Brain Differences, but Don't Panic

The news there actually isn't all that new in some ways actually.  Brain differences may not have been specifically previously noted, but what has been noted, scientifically, is that women's abilities in regards to mate choosing (it's hard to find a way to put this that doesn't sound odd) are significantly clouded if they're on the pill.

Now, what I don't mean is that women who are on the pill are less choosy about sex than women who are not.  They likely are.  While the risks associated with sex are there no matter what, rather obviously women who are at a higher risk of getting pregnant are no doubt a lot more careful than those who are not.

No, what I mean is that those who have studied it have said that women on the pill, for bio-psychological reasons that aren't well understood (but for which there may be a hint here) actually tend to choose men whom studies claim they'd frequently avoid if they weren't on the pill.

Again, while its really unpopular to say so, it's well known that sex impacts thought and psychologically women and men bond to each other upon having sex in a deeply psychological way.  One of the real fall outs from the sexual revolution that wasn't expected is the now fairly well demonstrated psychological wounding that casual sex has brought about.  People don't actually end up feeling "liberated" at all, but rather they become more animalistic with their behavior while feeling a deep sense of loss.  Like with so many other things, the old standards turn out to have a real basis beyond that which were imagined.

Anyhow, earlier studies found that women selecting long term mates while on the aforementioned pharmaceuticals often went in a different direction, the studies claimed, than they would have but for them.  As part of that, when off, there was the responding reaction of "what the @#$@#$ have I done here?" in some instances.

Anyhow, any time something changes in your brain due from what it would be in a state of nature is, in fact, a reason to panic.  That headline makes about as much sense as one stating "Smoking changes lungs. . .put don't panic."

This isn't, of course, the first concerning study on the pill, or more properly the pills.  Prior studies have pointed out increased health risks of all sorts, including cancer and strokes.  And this in turn makes the pill one of those pharmaceutical products which it is pretty clear the FDA wouldn't allow on the market today, if just introduced today, but which is due to our being both acclimated and societaly dependent on it.  There's as much chance of addressing it objectively as there would have been on objecting tobacco in Virginian in 1798.  Not going to happen.

So, "don't panic", is the advice you'll get.

And then there are these headlines:

Breast Cancer Warning Tied To Hair Dye

and;

Hair Dyes and Straighteners May Raise Breast Cancer Risk for Black Women

First, let's clear something up.  There are risk for white women, black women, Asian women, Latina women. The risk is to women.  The headline is deceptive.

There's a heightened risk however for black women.

We're not really certain why that is, but my guess is that it has to do with frequency of use rather than anything else.  It's not, of course, that other women, particularly white women, don't use hair products, but the marketing aimed at black women and white women are different as their hair is.  One of those difference is noted right in the headline.  White women don't often use hair straighteners.

African Americans have put up with a lot of hair abuse, it should be noted.  I don't know when it really got started but my guess is that it's a 20th Century thing.  Once African Americans moved into the cities in the Great Migration, they started to take up urban styles, for obvious reasons, and that meant taking up the urban hair styles of the day.  Both men and women were affected with this and one of the things that was affiliated upon them was hair straighteners.  African American men seem to have largely abandoned this in the 1960s, and I suspect that may be in part to conscription.  Nobody is going to mess with their hair too much if they're fighting in Vietnam, for example. I note that as during the 1960s African American men really abandoned this stuff en masse and have never taken it back up.  African American women did for awhile as well, but then at some later point, the late 80s or 90s, it became popular in their community for hair to be straightened and colored once again.

If there's any leveling factor in here at all, it's notable that, if anything, white women are really taking up messing with hair color in spades now and it's even spread to white men.  The pretty girl who looks like she's been in a tragic fishing tackle accident at Albertson's, for example, has lime green hair.  So that's going to be catching up with them as well.

All this fits into the unfortunate set of facts that women are uniquely afflicted with those who want to change how they look for no good reason.  Women look the way they're supposed to look without hair dies, hair straighteners or giant artificial lips or boobs.  Just stop it should be the cri de couer here. Don't.  You'll be better for it in every way.

This would seem to be self evident, but all the known health risks with the pill haven't put much of a dent in its marketing and popularity and all the demonstrated disaster due to synthetic boobs haven't caused that to stop either.

So yes, panic.

Or maybe just "Go organic", in a broader sense.

So then what? Lex Anteinternet: December 1, 1969. The United States resumes a lottery system for conscription.

Last week we published this item:

Lex Anteinternet: December 1, 1969. The United States resumes a lott...:

In that, we noted the following:

The resumption of a lottery system for the draft, in which each registrant was assigned a number and the number then drawn at random, was designed to attempt to reduce the unpopularity of conscription at that point in the Vietnam War.  Numerous changes were made to the system during the war including ending a marriage exemption and ultimately curtaining an exemption for graduate students. With the adoption of the lottery system also came a change in age focus so that rather than top of those in the age range being drafted it then focused on those who were 19 years old. The reason for this was that if a person's number wasn't chosen in the lottery as a 19 year old, they were not going to be drafted and could accordingly plan around that.

So, as noted, the concept was that the lottery would reduce resistance to the draft.

So, did it?

In fact, it did remarkably, and not only that, protests of the Vietnam War dropped off on college campuses remarkably in 1970.

Now, not completely.  Indeed, one of the absolute worst events associated with the era of college war protests, the shooting at Kent State, would come in 1970.  But there was a marked reduction.

Indeed, university faculty, which had evolved from a sort of genteel conservatism early in the 20th Century into an increasingly liberal faculty over the years, was both surprised and disappointed as they'd come to believe that the core of the opposition was social concern, rather than personal concern.  It turned out that at least the evidence was the opposite.

So, what generally occurred with the lottery is that a large number of men knew after a lottery call that they were never going to be drafted and they accordingly planned conventionally.  Another group knew for sure it had been drafted and planned for that. A number in the middle felt their chances of being drafted were likely, reviewed the deferments they might be qualified for, with quite a few heading for Reserve component recruiters or the ROTC building.

The opposition to the war certainly didn't end.  But the heat had been taken out of the issue to a surprising degree.

Vietnam and the Law of Unintended Consequences: The AR15

I've been writing a lot, in contravention to our recent focus on 1915-17 in a distinct, sometimes daily, way, about the Vietnam War.  Indeed, it's always been an interest of mine and I have have several other threads in the hopper.

This one is one that I've hesitated to write about as I'm well aware that its really controversial.  So much so that it sparks rage in some people on both sides of a debate that rapidly become so vitriolic that they aren't part of a debate at all.

I speak of the AR15 rifle.

Long winded vitriolic introduction

 Paratrooper in Vietnam armed with M16A1 rifles.  This trooper seems to have a cleaning brush sticking through the front swivel.  That's something I've never seen a photo of before, but in some photos you can see the assembled cleaning rods, designed to be carried disassembled in the stock, sticking through the ventilation holes of the front grip to be used an emergency ramrod in case the weapon jammed.

Now, let me note right away, this isn't a debate about gun control or "gun violence" (that odd newspeak category of violence).  If you want to read my views on that you can read my several other threads that touch on it.*  No, this is about the law of unintended consequences.

Eh?

Yes, exactly.

And for that, we need a little background about the AR15 and the M16, one of Robert S. McNamara's gifts to the military that just keeps on giving.

And if a person wonders what I mean by that, I don't like the M16.  And yes, I have personal experience with the M16, or rather I should say a variety of those jamming plastic and steel direct impingement second rate assault rifles, if that's what it is, the M16A1.**

 Me, with one of the several M16A1s I carried at one time or another doing stuff similar to this. This photograph was taken in South Korea.  This M16A1 was not made by Colt.  It was made by General Motors Hydramatic Division.  It was one of the better ones I used over the years and I can't recall this one jamming.

Now,  just saying that in that fashion will send some people into cardiac arrest.  The "American Rifle", or whatever its being called today, has come to absolute dominate a large section of the rifle market.  And I think it's junk.  Well, if not junk, it has problems.

And I don't mean in a "they should be banned" sense.  I mean that in a "they don't like to work" sense.

Vietnam War Era manual for the soldier on the M16A1.  This manual was still in use in the early 80s when I was in the National Guard, but it was being phased out at that time by a less teenagerish version.  This document is interesting in that the Army thought it had to publish a cartoon book in order to get soldier to read the manual.  It's also interesting in that it was drawn by famous cartoonish Will Eisner, who had military experience, but who used the stock grizzled sergeant as a stock character. By this time during the Vietnam War a lot of Sergeant E-5s weren't much older than the privates.  The actual book itself featured a cartoon buxom female character was was drawn as if she was right out of Terry and the Pirates, which probably wasn't too relevant to a generation that thought Jane Fonda and various Playboy victims were the model of feminine beauty.

This was well known in Vietnam and it's the fault of the design, contrary to what latter day legions of apologist say about the rifle.  One of the best minor monuments of the recent Burns and Novik documentary on the war, in my view, came when Marine Corps veteran John Musgrave called it a piece of junk.  It was still well known in the 1980s when we lubricated the weapon with gallons of banana scented Break Free to make sure it'd work.  And it's been a consistent complaint about it in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It's the reason that piston variants like the HK416 show up in special use and the gas system weaknesses are why nobody else in the world attempts to field an assault rifle that features that gas system.

 Philippine Army soldiers armed with a HK416, a piston using variant of the AR that cures its feeding problems. This version was designed by the German firm of Hecklar & Koch and has been widely used around the world, including by the United States in the hands of special troops.

We ought to replace it.

But we don't.

And yes, none of that is what I'm writing about here, although its related.

Part of the reason, I suspect, that we don't replace the M16/M4 weapons is that the service buys them.

Well of course, you say, how else would they get them?

Well, prior to the M16A1 the service's standard rifles weren't purchased, as a rule, usually. They were made by the Government. And that's what the point of this post is.

And its an interesting example of the law of unintended consequences.  Maybe.

Bear with me, I'm getting there.

A civilian item has to be marketed.

The M16A4/A5 and M4 carbines the Armed Forces use today came about as developments of the earlier rifles, the most significant of which is the M16A1. The M16A1 was a Vietnam era corrective improvement of the design of the M16 most significantly featuring a big plunger that allowed a soldier to jam the bolt home when it jammed as one more shot is better than none at all.

The M16 was a military selective fire variant of the AR15, sometimes inaccurately called the "Colt AR15".  The AR15 itself was a 5.56 (or .223 if you prefer) development of the AR10, the original design.

 The original variant of the AR10 with wrapped fiberglass stock and realty weird flash hinder.  The AR10 has seen a revival after having truly been dead in that it has come back into the service as a designated marksman rifle.  While I do not like the ARs, this makes a lot of sense as its very similar to the rifle otherwise in service and it is quite accurate.  "Joe Loong - originally posted to Flickr as DSCF1108 CC BY-SA 2.0 File:AR-10 in the National Firearms Museum.jpg."

The AR10 was the brainchild of Fairchild engineer Eugene Stoner.  Stoner was out to design an assault rifle that could be manufactured cheaply using the newest in World War Two technology and Fairchild was looking for ways to exploit that technology.

Yes, its' that old.

 Stg44 (or in this case a MP 43/1) using optical sight, which most did not, and featuring stamped receiver and in some instances a plastic butt stock.  Almost everything about this World War Two era German assault rifle was every bit as modern as the features of the AR15/M16.  CC BY-SA 3.0 de File:Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1979-118-55, Infanterist mit Sturmgewehr 44.jpg Created: 31 December 1942

Anyhow, Stoner's idea was to make a cheap assault rifle out of stamped steel and plastic.  It these regards it wasn't really revolutionary as the world's first assault rifle, accepted as such, ultimately came to do that as well.  Stoner's design also omitted any sort of advance gas system, such a a piston or block, and simply blew tapped gas back on a cup machined on top of a bolt carrier and then vented into the action.  In this fashion it wasn't revolutionary either, as a semi automatic rifle used by the Swedes during World War Two (in which they were neutral) also used it.  Like the M16, it had performance problems.

If you think, gee, that's going to get things pretty dirty, you'd be right.

Anyhow, at some point this branch of Fairchild, Armalite, separated from Faichild and the company went about trying to market the AR10 with limited success after entering the competition for a new battle rifle for the United States and not prevailing in it.***  Some were in fact purchased and even used in combat in distant regions of the globe, with the example of Portuguese paratroopers in Angola perhaps being the most significant.  It might be noted that the Portuguese have always shown an affinity for eclectic weapons choices and, at the same time, their officers were carrying Luger's in combat, which would make most people knowledgeable about modern weapons gasp.

Anyhow, also in the 1950s the United States was also experimenter with .22 caliber rifles, which things chambered in .222 and .223 are.  Not .22 LR, of course, which is the most common little tiny cartridge on earth, but centerfire .22 caliber weapons.  

It was an experiment.

At the time the US had just adopted the M14 rifle, which it made.

And that gets to one of our first really big salient points.

The government had designed and made the M14.

 Paratrooper in Vietnam with M14 rifle.  While its seemingly been forgotten, the US Army was equipped with the M14 at the start of the Vietnam War, as were the Marines.  The Air Force was still equipped with the M1 Garand, as was the Navy.  The Guard and Reserve was completely equipped with M1 Garands.

We're in the late 1950s at this point.  But let's explore that, as that's a hugely significant point in our essay of today. The government had made and designed the M14.

Indeed, the U.S. Government had made every principal standard longarm it had equipped its military with since the foundation of the country.  That was the system.  Longarms, such as rifles and muskets, were made in government arsenals.  They were usually, indeed almost always, designed by government employees.  In the rare instances in which they were not designed by government employees, such as with the Krag series of rifles and carbines, the U.S. Government bought a license to produce them and then made them, itself, under license.

The only exceptions to this in any form came normally during big wars, or with small purchases.  So, for example, prior to the Civil War you will find that the Army bought small lots of Sharps carbines.  Small lots.  During the Civil War the Army bought everything going, but the Civil War was a really big war.  During the Indian Wars the Army bought small lots of experimental weapons, but didn't adopt them, and then the Navy and Marine Corps bought relatively small lots of Remington made Lees at various points up to and during the Spanish American War (the United States, not the United Kingdom, was the first nation on earth to equip itself in any fashion with a Lee rifle. . . take that SMLE fans).  During World War One the Government contracted for huge lots of M1917 Enfields and bought small lots of Mosin Nagants (that had been rejected by the Imperial Russian inspectors, who must have been delusional given the circumstances their nation was under).  

And so on.

But for long arms, the big story was Springfield Armory. To a lesser extent, and at different times, the story was also Rock Island Arsenal and Harpers Ferry Arsenal.

Now, if this is a bit shocking in our super glory of the free market era, we should note that this wasn't unusual at all and wasn't limited to longarms.  The government also manufactured artillery (it isn't like there's a big civilian market for it, after all).  It made saddles by the thousands as well, for which there was a big civilian market, and all sorts of tack.  Prisoners in Ft. Leavenworth made bad footwear for the Army for many years.  At one point between World War One and World War Two the government manufactured 6x6 trucks. . . nobody else was making them and the artillery branch needed them.

 Cavalrymen at Ft. Riley Kansas, 1940.  The pack and riding saddle that are in this photo were both types manufactured by the government itself.

It's also worth noting that there were certain things the government didn't make, and some of them were surprising.  The government quit making handguns sometime prior to the Civil War.  The introduction of Colt revolvers seems to have caused that to come about. Whatever it was, they had made them, and they just quit.  And the U.S. military actually uses a surprising number of handguns.  The U.S. military also never made very many machineguns, which is odd.  It did try to come up with one during World War Two but a production goof made that example lousy, and it had made a few prior to World War One.. The one and only machinegun it ever tried to field that was its own design was the M15/M14E1, a light machinegun variant of the the M14, and it wasn't very good.  The M14 was excellent, but the M14E1 wasn't.

During this entire time the US never made a really bad longarm.  It made some that didn't quite pan out, such as the Krag, and some that were so so, like the trapdoor Springfield's, but it never made a really awful longarm, which is remarkable.  And when things didn't quite pan out, because they made them, they usually reacted pretty quickly as a rule, although the long history of the trapdoor runs contrary to that. 

And then came the AR15 and Robert McNamara.

 Robert S. McNamara.

When the US entered the Vietnam War, it sent its troops in with M14s, which were just coming into service. They were so new, and there were so few, that the National Guard never received them.  And they worked fine.  

We were, as another thread explores here in depth, also supplying our ally, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, with weapons.  The ARVN didn't get M14s, they got, and had been getting for some time, M1 Garands (another great U.S. arsenal design) and M1/M2 Carbines (a World War Two design by Winchester that was in fact acquired by contract from civilian manufacturers and which was, in fact, not a very good military weapon).

And then came in the USAF.

From 1948 when it was created up until, well, forever, the USAF has had sort of weird price of place in military acquisitions.  The Air Force generally, but not always, gets what it wants.  And it decided that airmen would have been way too burdened to guard air bases in Vietnam equipped with M1 Garands (which is what they would have had, M14s wouldn't have caught up with the Air Force yet) and therefore it would buy the new, super sexy, AR15 in a selective fire form.

 

World War Two vintage poster depicting tough combat infantryman with an M1 Garand.  The Air Force didn't want the M1 to do its talking in Vietnam.

Which takes us back to the AR10 and the .223. 

The experiment I noted above resulted in various entities, and Springfield Armory, coming up with .223 designs to be tested. Winchester made a rifle that was based on the M1 Carbine, which is a fairly lousy military weapon but which does function fine.  Its product was a lot like the later Ruger Mini14.  Springfield Armory again adapted, albeit half halfheartedly, the Garand action that was used for the M1 Garand and the M14 to the .223 and also came up with a weapon that bears a strong resemblance to the later Ruger Mini14.  Armalite adapted the AR10. As Winchester later lamented, the AR15 looked "sexy".

The Army yawned and the halfhearted effort of Springfield Armory showed that it never thought the .223 was going to go anywhere anyway, but the Air Force said "Golly Gee Bob!.  Look at that nifty thing". and adopted it.  As Armalite's production capacity was nonexistent Colt, taking a gamble as it was really a pistol manufacture, bought the rights to Stoners design.  So Colt fell into a military contract in 1963 when the U.S. Air Force, not the U.S. Army, bought AR15s to equip its men in Vietnam with.****  Right around the same time the Secret Service also bought AR15s.  Indeed, if you look closely at the famous video footage of John F. Kennedy's assassination, you can see that a Secret Serviceman in the car behind Kennedy's is carrying an AR15.

Now, the real irony of this is that the Air Force is the service that's least qualified to decide anything about small arms and in truth perimeter security in Vietnam would have been just as readily served by men carrying M1 Garands.  Heck, it would have been better served. The Air Force didn't need M16s and it shouldn't have received them.  It was patently absurd.  Compounding the problem, however, the Army's Special Forces took some M16s and heaped lavish praise on them, the recipients of the praise forgetting that special troops are notoriously able to make use of weapons that regular soldiers cannot.

This combined result then operated to convince William C. Westmoreland, whom we've recently otherwise read about, to urge the ordering of what had then been adopted as a limited standard as the M16 by the Army of the Republic of Vietnam.  There was some logic to his decision.  For one thing, the ARVN soldiers were tiny.  The M1 Garand which they were supplied with by the United States was huge and the alternative M1/M2 Carbine was ineffective.  The M16 seemed just the ticket.

The ARVN was not impressed.  While Americans have heaped condemnation on the ARVN for decades many ARVN troops saw years and years of combat and they weren't actually asking for new small arms.  When they received the M16 they were amongst the first to discovery that it jammed, and jammed badly. They were convinced that the Americans were giving them junk that the Americans themselves weren't using. That was soon to change.

 ARVN Rangers during the Tet Offensive.  Some ARVN units fought well throughout the Vietnam War including special units such as this.  By Tet, the ARVN on the whole was fighting well and most of its troops were equipped with M16A1s, although you still find examples of them carrying M1 Carbines right to the end of the war.

Coincident with the first ordering of the M16 there were teething problems with the production of M14s.  In retrospect they weren't all that bad and even recent US military history at the time should have revealed that.  There had been teething problems with the M1903 Springfield and the M1 Garand as well.  Production capacity limits meant that the M1903 never was fully replaced during World War Two in spite of a massive effort to manufacture M1 Garands.  During World War One production limits had lead to the as many M1917s being made as M1903s. So this wasn't really new.  More than enough M14s existed to equip the active duty Army and Marine Corps, even if the reserves did nto receive them. But they were practically new.  Nonetheless McNamara had the production of M14s stopped.

This was a monumentally boneheaded move and this alone deserves to rate Robert Strange McNamara as a Department of Defense disaster.  Springfield Armory dated back to the early history of the country, and now it was idled and no M14s were being made.  M16s, on the other hand, were coming in from Colt and would soon be licensed by Colt to other companies as production for the Vietnam War heated up.  It was soon decided to equip US soldiers in Vietnam with the rifle.

Problems rapidly developed, although they were problems the ARVN was already aware of.  The gun jammed and people were getting killed.  The immediate solution was to come out with the A1 variant of the rifle, the M16A1, which featured a large plunger that struck the bolt to close it in an emergency.  This didn't solve the problem but it did mean that there was at least the hope of not getting killed if the rifle jammed up in combat.^

 Paratrooper cleaning an M16 in 1966, at which time it was still an experimental arm.

The M16A1 was not well received.  Marine Corps units avoided using it as long as possible  by shifting M14s to units in the field and M16s back to the rear. This went on until the M14s had been withdrawn and they just couldn't get away with it any longer. The Army, being larger, never had that opportunity and so it went right into front line units  The initial results were disastrous as the new weapon locked up like a drum in combat.  People with long memories recalled after the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Cavalry Division ran into trouble with the weapon at Ia Drang in 1966 that the same regiment had experienced fatal weapons jams nearly a century earlier at Little Big Horn due to the copper cartridges used by the Army in the action sticky trapdoor Springfield at that time.

New orders requiring "Tiger" to prodigiously clean the weapon constantly, prodigious lubrication and a switch in powder for ammunition partially alleviated the problem but it's never gone away.  Oddly, the current M4 Carbine is reported to jam more than the M16A5, showing that they both jam, but the carbine inexplicably jams more.  But the M16 has kept on keeping on.

That was in part because in 1968 the Secretary of Defense had Springfield Armory closed for good.

Springfield Armory had been mounting a rear guard action against the M16 ever since it had been introduced.   The M16A1 was standardized in 1967 and the M16 had been ordered to replace the M14 by McNamara at least two years earlier.  So the United States lost a manufacturing capacity for small arms, by the military itself, that it had since 1777.

A private industrial concern

The closing of Springfield Armory, the replacement of the M14 by the M16, and the utilization of a private contractor for the first time in the nation's history to supply all of the nation's small arms need created a situation that was unprecedented.


Prior to the M16, the US had never had to rely solely upon private industry for the supply of muskets or rifles.  Privately produced longarms had existed before, of course, but never without the Government itself making the established standard longarm.  Privately produced longarms were the exception to the rule, sometimes a huge exception to the rule, but an exception.  As noted, this wasn't the case for handguns and that would soon prove to be the model for what would next occur.

Just as it had never been the case that the nation had been without a longarm manufacturing arsenal, it had also not been the case for years that a major private manufacturing plant was left making a military model of weapon with only one customer, the military end user.  It had happened before during wartime of course.  Various companies had made M1903s, M1s and M1 Carbines, amongst other weapons, for the U.S. Government during wartime.  But the last instance of this happening had been during the Korean War when contracts for M1 Garands had been put out. Granted, that had not been a long time prior.

Colt, for its part, had a spotty history with longarms and was really a handgun manufacturer.  It had tried to introduce longarms from time to time but rarely with any kind of success.  Suddenly, however, in the early 1960s it found itself owning a longarms that was in sudden demand by the US. Soon thereafter, it owned the rights to what was now the standard US rifle, the first time in history that a private company had been in that position, although it must not have been a sole manufacturing right given the later history of what occurred.  The M16 would prove to be an economic boon to Colt.

Colt had always had the policy of selling the same models of pistols it manufactured for the Service to civilians. This had long been its custom. And indeed, it was often the case that a newly adopted military model was available to civilians slightly before it was delivered to the military.  With that being the history, it's no surprise what happened next.  In 1964 Colt started manufacturing the rifle for civilian sales as the AR15 Sporter.

That shows how vast the production capacity of Colt really was at the time.  Colt was fulfilling military orders for the M16 and yet was still able to manufacture AR15s for civilian sales.  Having said that, the AR15 received a bit of a mixed civilian reception at the time.

It had been a very long time since a major American firearms manufacture had offered the pure military version, nearly, of a military longarm for civilian purchase and it had never been the case that an American manufacture had offered what was the primary military longarm for civilians sales. That's a bit nuanced, however, as Springfield Armory had been the manufacture of that weapon since 1777 and it had done that on a periodic basis.  Springfield Armory offered a customized sporting version of the Trapdoor Springfield rifle to soldiers (officers were the primary customers) in the 19th Century and it had sold M1903s to civilians in various versions from 1903 until 1939.  Target variants of the full military M1903 were the most common to be sold by Springfield Armory to civilian customers but actions were also commonly sold for sporting rifles.  This, we should note, mirrored the sales of DWM in Germany which sold full military G98s, as well as a lot of sporting variants, to target shooters throughout the long history of the production of that rifle.  Following World War Two, when the M1 Garand became required for National Match shooting, it sold accuraized M1 Garands, as well as conventional used Garands (and other older rifles) to civilian customers.  When the M14 was introduced it sold a very few National Match M14s to civilian customers.

But there had never been a time when the primary military longarm was solely being manufactured by a private concern and that private concern offered the rifle, almost, for civilian sales. That was new. The closest thing that had occurred prior to that was military versions of longarms made by private manufacturers that were not official US weapons, such as musket versions of the Sharps .45-70 rifle, but which were sometimes adopted by states for their National Guard (New York in that case) or, more recently, private manufacture of M1 Carbine versions after World War Two (and up to the present day) by small manufacturers.

When Colt introduced the AR15 Sporter, as noted, civilian shooters were mixed in their opinions about it, and this continued for an extremely long time. There was no obvious use for it other than it being a giant plinker, which is the primary use it received.  At the time, the .223/5.56 cartridge was not legal for big game in very many places and the AR15 did not have a reputation for accuracy or reliability.  One of its primary drawing points, frankly, was that it was a military weapon and it appealed to individuals (and I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this) who liked military style weapons.  Even at that, however, quite a few true rifleman shunned the weapon and associated it with poor design and questioned whether a weapon that was a semi automatic variant of an assault rifle was really a rifle.

It dominated the .223 field however until Ruger introduced the Mini14 in 1973.  Even that event, however said a lot about how the AR15 was viewed, as Ruger chose to  introduce a rifle that looked, and was named, a lot like a miniature version of the beloved M14 rather than one that looked like the Stg44.  The Mini14 nearly supplanted the M16 in the Marine Corps, however, as the Marines, which never liked the M16, took a serious look at replacing the M16 with it.*****  As a commercial offering Ruger, however, reflecting the views of its owner, refused to offer the firearms with more than a five round magazine, in spite of losing sales on larger magazines to after market manufacturers^^

The M16 wasn't replaced, of course, and is with us still.  Accuracy of the rifle improved enormously with later variants and it isn't the rifle it was during the Vietnam War in a lot of ways.  And the AR15 is still with us as well.

At some point, the M16 went from being the only thing in its niche to absolutely dominant in the American firearms world.  How it happened isn't really clear, but it's happened.  Even though the rifle has never been reliable it's now enormously common and it virtually sucks the air out of the room to a certain degree.  Whereas in the 1970s a firearms store that sold Colt handguns would have one AR15 in the rack, now nearly any sporting goods stores selling firearms has rows of AR15 type rifles, although they aren't Colts.  Colt has been troubled for years and it no longer offers civilian AR15s for sale on a exclusive basis. There are leagues of other manufacturers and Colts are by far not the most common.  The rifle not surprisingly entered the target world when it was finally required to be used for standard National Match over the M14, it no longer being possible to pretend the M14 was the service rifle, but it has also entered the game fields in large numbers.  The process is mysterious, but very real. A person can't pick up any of the gun magazines without having to thumb through pages of M4/M16 knock offs in the advertisements and articles.

Now, saying anything bad about the AR is dangerous.  One writer lost his employment when he criticized the AR in 2007, stating the following:

I must be living in a vacuum. The guides on our hunt tell me that the use of AR and AK rifles have a rapidly growing following among hunters, especially prairie dog hunters. I had no clue. Only once in my life have I ever seen anyone using one of these firearms.

I call them "assault" rifles, which may upset some people. Excuse me, maybe I'm a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity. I'll go so far as to call them "terrorist" rifles. They tell me that some companies are producing assault rifles that are "tackdrivers."

Sorry, folks, in my humble opinion, these things have no place in hunting. We don't need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them, which is an obvious concern. I've always been comfortable with the statement that hunters don't use assault rifles. We've always been proud of our "sporting firearms."

This really has me concerned. As hunters, we don't need the image of walking around the woods carrying one of these weapons. To most of the public, an assault rifle is a terrifying thing. Let's divorce ourselves from them. I say game departments should ban them from the praries [sic] and woods.

Now that writer probably hadn't thought out what he was writing at the time (and note, I'm not endorsing it) but his opinion was a lot more widespread than people might believe.  Back in the 1970s, before AKs (other than Vietnam War prize rifles, which did in fact exist at first) were around, older riflemen expressed similar views.  My own father was of the opinion that the AR15 was for one thing and one thing only, "killing people" and disdained them.  A career Army man who in retirement worked as a highly knowledgeable gun salesman locally openly disdained the AR15 and discouraged people from buying the one his store was required to carry in a the rack, a view that was followed by everyone else in the store including the owner.  Something really changed in regards to the AR following the 1980s, and I'm not sure what it was.

 U.S. Marines training in Iraq in 2004. This Marine is armed with the M16A2, a version of the M16 that was designed by the Marine Corps itself and then adopted by the Army.  The rear sight is completely different from that of the old M16 and M16A1 and the forearm is much stiffer. The barrel is also much heavier.  The M16A2 came about after the Marine Corps determined that Ruger could not supply it with adequate numbers of Mini14s and that it was stuck with the AR.  It is a hugely improved version of the M16 and is really the rifle people think of today when they think of the M16.

Other than that with the M16A2, a Marine Corp designed version, the rifle actually became truly accurate.  Indeed, for the type of rifle it is, its highly accurate.  Nearly all of the AR fans who decry other .223 semi automatic rifles for being inaccurate only have experience with the M16A2 and later versions, rather than the M16A1 which had lackluster accuracy and was flimsy. The M16A2 was a huge improvement and the manufacturers of AR type rifles followed suit.  That surely explains some of it.

Beyond that, however, it must be the old Winchester noted "sex appeal" of the rifle that drives at least a fair amount of sales and its unacknowledged but clear status as the king of the range plinkers.  M4 carbine variants are all over the place even though the military problems with the M4 are legion.  Indeed, the service has been struggling with how to replace the M4 with a larger caliber rifle for years, and its only a matter of time before it occurs.

No matter the problems, there are seemingly endless varieties of M16 and M4 knockoffs now.  Even Ruger, Bill Ruger now long gone, offers a M4 type rifle along with its Minis.  Every gun magazine features page after page of AR type rifles now chambered in big game cartridges in what is sort of the return and revenge of the AR10, even though going afield with a rifle as cumbersome, complicated and bulky as that when after a  member of the Cervinae genus is really not the best choice.  And even now and then some kid shows up with a AR look alike for a 4H .22 shooting practice until the awkwardness of the design for that replaces it with something more conventional.

So, after all of this, am I endorsing the view of the writer above and demanding that sportsmen turn in their ARs?  No, I"m not.  Indeed, National Match shooters can't, even as they find themselves repeating history by shooting a target variants of a rifle that' no longer the combat standard, as the M4 is (and can't be made into a target rifle).

 U.S. Army soldier armed with the M4 Carbine, which has replaced the M16A5 as the frontline longarm.  It's still an AR, even tall tricked out with optical sights and doodads.  Oddly, the M4 jams more frequently than the M16A4/A4 although nobody has ever been able to determine why.  It's also less effective with its shorter barrel.  The adoption of it as the standard combat longarm is due to pure fadism in the service and nothing else.

But I am noting a few ironies, and do have a bit of a plea that will be like casting dust to the wind.

The irony is that the M16 as originally introduced was junk, and now its much improved junk.  It only became what it was as a Secretary of Defense who was wrong about nearly everything gutted the Army's ability to produce rifles for itself, and when that occurred it left manufacturing of the new service rifle with Colt, which had always had a business model of also offering for civilian sales whatever it was making for the service.  If the traditional model had been followed, the service would have acquired full rights to the M16 (and it must have acquired some) assuming we adopted it, and Springfield Armory would have been making them by 1968, along with supplemental civilian purchases.  It's somewhat doubtful that, if that occurred, any civilian manufacturer would have been allowed to introduce the AR15 or anything like it.  Indeed, I highly doubt it.  And given as it took years and years for the AR to take on the dominant status it now occupies, that may very well have never have happened.  Indeed, I doubt it would have. Today Springfield Armory would stil have been making M16s in something like the M16A5 variant, I doubt the M4 would ever have occurred, and maybe the Government would have licensed somebody to make a National Match variant, or maybe not.

So, in a weird way, the Vietnam War created the current situation in which a substitute for Air Force perimeter guards in a rainy Asian land became "America's Rifle" and the subject of some raging debate.

And my plea, or comment I guess, is that frankly, the ARs, to include the M16 and the M4, just aren't all that.  They're a problem weapons that has managed to really stick around, just like the the Trapdoor system of the late 19th Century but more so.  Running down Rugers or the like really doesn't cut it.  It is accurate, to be sure, but it isn't the end all and be all of anything, let alone the various .223s out there.  Plenty of bolt action .223s beat the AR in the game fields any day.  The old Minis plink just as plinkish as the ARs do, and work every time.  On the target range for its class, however, the AR is very good.

And beyond that, and here's the part that people causes debates and for which even somebody whose views on gun control hardly match the banners, are sort of shunned for saying, there's a real shift that's occurred over time reflected by the ARs.  Racks of tacticool ARs are at every gun store but why?  That wasn't the case some 30 years ago or so.  What's that mean?

It may mean nothing more than they are fun and easy to shoot, and on the range the functioning problems aren't much of a problem.  Or it may mean that a fascination with combat weapons, or at least that particular combat weapon, has spread from a niche category of shooting fans who were nearly like engineers in their view of that category of weapons, fascinated by mechanics, to some other sort of less technical fascination.  Certainly there's something to that as its not hard to find gun magazines that feature monthly articles on tactical shooting, even though that's something that has to be trained into proficiency, not read into efficiency.  As I noted much earlier on this blog, the United States, recent horrific events aside, is at an all time low in regard to violence and the chances of any one person needing to engage in tactical shooting with a carbine here is really low.  Maybe that's part of it.  Men, and it's mostly men, crave manly things, and the era when a huge percentage of men had military experience is over.

Not that I'm arguing that they should be banned, or any such thing.  Truth be know, the AR isn't much more advanced than the Remington 08, the Remington semi automatic rifle that was introduced by Remington in 1908 and which only came in a carbine form.  And like the AR, its virtues (and it had plenty) were a bit oversold too.

At the end of the day here, this post is about letting a little air in the room.  The current focus on the AR is just as overblown as Remington's suggestion that that hunter is going to survive his encounter with that bear.  Indeed, that poster is the subject of an amusing parody in which you see his hat flying off the cliff, he's gone, and the bear is going around the corner.^^^

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*They include:

Lex Anteinternet: The problems with every debate on gun control are....

Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities.

Packing Heat

Lex Anteinternet: Peculiarized violence and American society. Looking at root causes, and not instrumentalities. Looking Again.

**The M16, in its selective fire military form, is probably an assault rifle, although early on it was sometimes referred to as an automatic rifle, which isn't quite the same thing.  Defining the term has always been extraordinarily difficult, but generally it means a selective fire rifle, fulfilling the role of rifle and machinegun, which fires an intermediate sized cartridge.  The Stg44 was the world's first assault rifle, coming out in the early 1940s in German production and made in creasing numbers until the end of World War Two.

***A battle rifle differs from an assault rifle in that it fires a full sized cartridge and may be semi automatic or selective fire, at least by some definitions.  The Belgian FAL is perhaps the most famous example of a battle rifle, with others being the M14 and the German G3.  The AR10 may have been a battle rifle or perhaps an assault rifle, depending upon how a person views it.

****This was actually the second military contract for the AR15.  Malaysia had contracted to purchase them in 1961.

^One of the designers who apparently came to the conclusion that the AR had real problems was its own designer, Eugene Stoner, who went on to design a new rifle featuring many of the AR's better features but abandoning its problematic gas system.  That rifle became the AR18.  Armalite introduced the gun to the market in 1969 but it never had the manufacturing capacity to really effectively market it and it was already competing against Stoner's own earlier invention, the AR15.

The AR18 has usually been passed off as a project to market an assault rifle to poorer nations, but that has to be baloney.  It was not any more mechanically simple, and therefore should not have been any more expensive to manufacture, than the AR15.  It was considerably more conventional in design, however, and completely abandoned the AR's direct impingement gas system in favor of a piston.  It also abandoned the AR's high line of sight which had come about due to the feeling that this would reduce recoil in the larger caliber AR10. That has always been a problem with the ARs and has only bee addressed very recently as the M4 went to optical sights and the upper carrying  handle, which is the support for the rear sight, has become detachable.

The AR18 failed to secure any major military contracts although there were small military sales to some nations and police forces.  The US Army actually evaluated it but didn't want to buy yet another 5.56 rifle, which would seem to have been obvious.  The weapon obtained some infamy, however, as it was popular (along with AR15s) with the Irish Republican Army which liked it enough to give it the nickname "the Widowmaker".  A civilian version was offered in the form of the AR180 but it received little interest.

*****The Mini14, in spite of being constantly slammed by the fans of the AR15 actually came close to supplanting it, although the details are hard to come by.  My information from it comes from a fellow who was involved in Marine Corps procurement at the time, although you can pick up bits and pieces of the story elsewhere.

That the Marines never liked the M16 is well known.  They approached Ruger directly about acquiring Mini14s to replace the rifle and the only thing which kept it from occurring is that Ruger was engaged in a major overseas contract at the time and lacked the production capacity to fulfill a Marine Corps order.  So the Marines gave up and went on to design the M16A2 to fix the accuracy problems of the M16A1. The M16A2 went on to replace the M16A1 in the Army and Marines and the M16 in the Air Force.

Minis actually have a notable military record, but AR fans hate to admit it as it means that a rifle that looks so much more, well, World War Two, competed and still does with the AR.  It equipped the Bermuda Regiment, in a selective fire variant, of the British Army and selective fire variants are used by Philippine paramilitary police.  British police also have used it in the past and the French produce their own selective fire variant for their police.  Various orders are believed to have gone here and there in shipments that the US doesn't really want to track back to the US military.  It was widely used by US law enforcement personnel at one time, but that has very much declined in favor of the AR in recent years.

^^Bill Ruger was castigated by some in the firearms community for that view at the time.  Now there'd be absolute riots on this statement. His view wasn't uncommon at the time.  Just as there are those who regard any such statement as traitorous to firearms users today, at the time there were a fair number of people who believed that firearms manufacturers, like Colt, who offered weapons that were so clearly military were undermining support for civilian firearms owners.

^^^After all of this I'll confess that a couple of years ago I was walking through a sporting goods store and came upon an AR in the M16A1 configuration made by somebody other than Colt.  I was surprised but actually looked at it, and found myself being nostalgic about it.  No, I didn't buy it and I'm not going to buy the Colt "retro" AR15 made in the M16A1 configuration either.

Anyhow, I never liked the M16A1 when I was a Guardsmen and hardly any of the guys I served with did either. The Vietnam veterans in our ranks, and there were a lot of them, openly disdained the rife.  It's a powerful demonstrator of the nature of nostalgia that a guy like me, who had no love for any AR, would actually stop and admire an old M16A1 type one.  The power of the longing for lost youth I suppose.  A lot of people must feel that way, as why else would Colt be offering one in the M16A1 configuration?