Will Dabbs

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.

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.

Setting her baby on a changing table she answered the front door to find a 17-year-old Jamaican named Lee Boyd Malvo. Malvo produced a .45-caliber handgun and shot the woman in the face. Thus began one of the most brutal killing sprees in American history.

Speaking in Turkey, Russian diplomat Andrei Karlov was shot on live television for all the world to see. The gun involved is little-known but powerful.

In August of 1916, the British 100th Company of the Machine Gun Corps fired their ten Vickers guns continuously for twelve hours. Using 100 barrels they fired a million rounds without a single failure. The Vickers gun continued in British military service until 1968.

The story of the assassination of John Lennon and a quick rundown of the revolver that was used.

KPV heavy machineguns fire a 14.5x114mm rounds at 600 rpm. To put that in perspective the .50-caliber cartridge fired by John Moses Browning’s M2 Heavy Barrel machinegun is 12.7x99mm. The KPV round carries roughly twice the muzzle energy of that fired by the American M2.

Muammar Mohammed Abu Minyar Gaddafi was born in either 1942 or 1943 to illiterate Bedouin parents who maintained no birth records. Rising from unimaginable poverty Gaddafi eventually amassed enough wealth to become the eighth richest person in human history. The sordid state in which he both entered and left the world stands in stark relief against the opulent splendor of his time in the sun.