Historical Guns

In a world where vacuous ill-informed talking heads chatter like chimps about assault rifles, weapons of mass destruction, and sundry other gun-related topics they clearly fail to understand, the gory machinegun murders of German Jimenez Panesso and his associate Juan Carlos Hernandez were actually the real deal.

In the second row of onlookers, Fromme reached underneath her ample robes and retrieved a Colt 1911 pistol from a holster on her left side. Extending her arm she leveled the gun at the President’s midriff at near contact range and squeezed the trigger.

That it ultimately cost the life of a patriot of Brian Terry’s caliber, as well as hundreds of Mexican nationals, make the whole sordid mess one of the most egregious government failures in American history.

Though the IRA made peace with the British, Irish guerrilla fighters sometimes remained killers. In this case, a bar fight led to a death by a Makarov PM.

On June 30, 1934, the German Schutzstaffel (SS) under orders from Adolph Hitler executed Operation Hummingbird. This decapitation strike against their erstwhile brothers in the Sturmabteilung (SA) was intended to remove the reprobate SA commander Ernst Rohm and consolidate supreme power in pre-WW2 Germany under Hitler’s personal control. Between 85 and 200 Germans fell to these brutal extra-judicial killings. History has come to refer to Operation Hummingbird as the Night of the Long Knives.

In the spring of 1968, he secured a room in an Atlanta boarding house. An avid reader, he happened upon an article in the Atlanta Constitution that outlined the coming itinerary for civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. Equipped with this tactical information, the career criminal and perennial loser James Earl Ray loaded up his Mustang and made a quick trek to Alabama.

Unboxing the test rifle, it was clear at a glance that the First Lite is not Roy Weatherby’s Mark V of yesteryear. The Mark V line got something of a makeover in the last few years, and the result is an updated take on an iconic and distinctly American rifle design.

On February 1, 1968, Saigon, South Vietnam, was in the opening throes of the Tet Offensive. North Vietnamese commanders called it “The General Offensive and Uprising of Tet Mau Than 1968.” Two days prior more than 80,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army troops had attacked more than 100 towns including 36 of 44 provincial South Vietnamese capitals.

Reading about the conspiracy theories that orbit around the eradication of the Nepalese monarchy makes the JFK assassination look like a first-grade field trip to the zoo.