Have Gun Will Travel

Guns guns there’s guns on the roof, Guns guns they’re made to shoot

Americans are Ready to Defend themselves from the Government.  Egyptians?  They have Rocks, Pots, and Pans!

This is for the gun guys. Gordon Duff and I were shooting the breeze last night and the subject naturally turned to guns.  One of the reasons, if I’m going to be candid, that I joined the Rhodesian security forces was because of their standard-issue rifle, the FN FAL. Oh, I wanted to help out too, of course! But I really wanted one of those rifles.

My life was pretty much formed by guns. Our house had maybe twenty rifles on the walls, shotguns in the gun case in the game room. My dad had a pair of Colt National Match automatics, one in .45 and one in .22 by his bed. He had a Colt Single Action in .38-40, which is actually a .40 caliber bullet. I never could figure where the .38 came from. We had a shooting range in the basement where we fired all manner of things. He was a hell of a shot with rifle, shotgun and handgun.

I grew up in the ‘50s watching Johnny Mack Brown and Gene Autry and my personal favorite, the Range Rider. Jock Mahoney was pretty terrific but his sidekick, Dick Jones, was far and away the best horseman in Hollywood. He was Jimmy Stewart’s congressional page in MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON and came from a trick-riding family. There was still a lot of Western talent in those days, in both riding and gun-handling.

When I was nine my dad gave me a Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special, a snub-nose .38. The neighbors were scandalized. We lived in an area in Illinois not far from where the Grimes sisters had been murdered and my dad didn’t want me to be a victim. What the neighbors didn’t realize was that I had been pretty strenuously schooled in gun safety since I was seven or so. That is, if he could walk in front of any weapon I was holding, which was mainly a cap gun, I’d get an ass-chewing. So by the time I was nine, you can believe that it was not possible to be shot accidentally by yours truly.

In 1959, when I was twelve, he put me on the Great Northern in Chicago and sent me to Billings, whence I took a bus down to Cody, Wyoming. I was met by a cowboy named Skip who drove me about sixty miles down the south fork of the Shoshone River to my new home for the summer. My dad would come to this ranch with his Johnson & Johnson buddies from New Jersey and hunt elk and antelope, guided by a famous big game outfitter named Les Bowman. I spent the summer wrangling horses for Bowman and being trained in the fine art of rifle-shooting. Every morning, after I fed his forty horses, I hand-loaded six rounds of .30-’06 ammunition and fired them through a chronograph downrange, recording afterward bullet speeds, drops and accuracy from different powder loads.

The next year I repeated this job, again along with a lot of drudge-work. I remember one very hot day and I was digging a drainage ditch from the pens when a new station wagon drove up. A friendly guy waved and asked where was the boss? I couldn’t help but notice on the driver’s door was the green logo of Remington Arms. I pointed up toward the main house and kept digging. One of Les’ granddaughters came and got me. Up at the house I was introduced to Tom Frye.

Remington Arms and Winchester and Weatherby and especially Marlin were always sending Les Bowman the latest products for field-testing and reviews in Outdoor Life, Field & Stream and the other gun mags. Les was the top authority on hunting rifles and bullet performance in the 1950s. But Tom Frye was something else. He cranked up a film recently taken down in Reno, where he’d broken the record for shooting little wooden blocks thrown up in the air, a record held for decades by Ad Topperwein, who’d hit over 72,000 straight. Tom got 100,004 out of 100,010 thrown with two Remington Nylon 66 .22s. He had a film of a fast-draw contest in Las Vegas that he came close to winning. I think the actual winner was Sammy Davis, Jr! But Tom impressed the holy hell out of me.

I lived in England for the year of 1967 without handguns, of course. Nevertheless, a nutcase ex-paratrooper downstairs had a Luger and would frequently, when drinking, threaten to shoot up into our apartment. I wanted that old Chief’s Special pretty badly, as you could imagine.

I got another one in Reno in ’68 when I started back to school. A friend had a Colt Commander which I admired and pretty soon I traded a strange Smith & Wesson Model 53 revolver in .22 Remington Jet for a .45 Commander to a dealer up in Virginia City, Willis Stone (Minuteman) who had the best gun store I’ve ever been in. I also traded a long-barreled Model 27 in .357 Magnum which hurt the hell out of my ears for a Browning Hi-Power. But I could never really get with the 9mm round. The .45 lightweight Commander would for me always be the ideal handgun.

But I didn’t start to get really serious about guns till I got a copy of Smith’s Small Arms of the World in 1972 and began to discover the wide world of military firearms. I’d visited Rhodesia the year before and remembered seeing FN rifles in the hands of some troops who’d jumped off their RL truck and run into the bookstore where I was to get the new book by Shay and Vermaak, The Silent War, which I also bought and studied carefully back home. I thought, hmm, I could probably get one of those FNs if I went back over there and joined up.

I was accepted (on paper) for the officer training program of the Rhodesian Light Infantry until the last minute before I was to depart. Major Nick Lamprecht sent me a telegram which stated that I was just discovered to be over-age. You had to be no more than 25 and I had just turned 26 three weeks earlier. I went anyway and attempted to appeal the ruling, but was turned down. So I joined the British South Africa Police with the assurance that after six months in uniform branch, to become familiar with Africans, I would join the full-time anti-terror group called Support Unit. I and some other geezers were given a short-course which obviated the police training and horse training and concentrated on counter insurgency and weapons familiarity. Right up my line. I’d grown up on horses and wasn’t there for that.

The RLI had huge stocks of captured weapons, mainly Soviet and Chinese AKs, AKMs, RPDs, RPGs, Tokarevs, SKSs, etc. The BSAP also had great quantities of the Communist gear but also had captured British, American and European machine guns and submachine guns. And we were issued our own rifles, the R1 version of the FN FAL, made under license in South Africa. Mission accomplished! The R1 was a black rifle with all black plastic furniture. The old-timers preferred the Belgian original FN, which was more refined in its machining and had wood butts. They were actually right because the wood butts had metal butt plates that didn’t catch on your shirt or jacket when you went to shoot. The R1 had a soft rubber butt cap that wasn’t as slick. Once you got it against your shoulder, it was fine. And I pretty much started, in the police anyway, the practice of accurate fire from the hip, in which I trained my guys very thoroughly in our immediate action drills. We found that the time it took to react to an ambush and then bring the rifle to your shoulder was occasionally too much time.

The FN is gas-operated, which means that some of the burning gas behind the bullet goes through a little hole at the top of the barrel and pushes against an alloy piston, which is forced back against the bolt and results in the action opening up briefly to eject the casing and load the next round. You can regulate the amount of gas and the force backward against the bolt. Some guys didn’t like recoil and would dial down the gas regulator. The tragic result of this practice was the rifle might not function if the hole was too small. One shot was all you got and several guys were killed in ambushes for not having instant firepower in the kill zone, which is the only possible way to survive a good ambush. So, we all opened our regulators to 9, the biggest opening. Who cares about a little recoil?

A big improvement to Support Unit’s arsenal were three Bren guns we captured from the terrorists. I was put in charge of getting them in good order. The barrels were so affected by corrosive primers that you couldn’t see daylight through them and the army only had spares in 7.62 NATO, not .303. So I took them to the range, loaded each weapon with one round in the spout, tied a long cord to the trigger and pulled it. Result: bullet went downrange and barrel did not blow up. Still couldn’t see daylight. Eventually, I was shooting them on full auto, quite accurately, and we put them to work. Never could see down them, which was amazing to me.

Now, here is where my rifle education broadened. We were operating on or near the Mozambique border in northeast Rhodesia, in and above the Zambesi Valley. Mozambique was also known as PEA or Portuguese East Africa and was patrolled by the Portuguese Army, as it was one of their three colonies in Africa. We called them Pork and Beans, naturally. And they were pretty casual about their counterterrorism activities, as you might expect from guys who are drafted and must spend I think it was two years in the bush. We would cross over the border occasionally and compare notes with the Porks. The rifle they carried was an ugly thing called the G-3. Ugly in comparison with our swoopy, modern-looking FNs but I would eventually realize that it is a thing of great beauty.

The FN, with its foot-long alloy piston, again depends on high-pressure gas going through the little aperture and impinging on the front end of the piston, driving it back against the bolt. If the aperture gets clogged with residue or say the piston gets polished by the owner a bit too much and gets under-gauge and allows gas to go around it, or the regulator wheel is set too small, you could have a misfire.

The G-3 is delayed blow-back, with a little roller-bearing in each side of the bolt that sits in a cavity in the receiver. When the recoil of the fired cartridge drives against the bolt, the two bearings must be forced out of their cavities and disappear into the bolt before the bolt can go back, thus delaying slightly the bolt going backward to open up the action and eject and reload. This delay soaks up and reduces recoil against your shoulder considerably.

There is also the matter of sights. The FN has closed or aperture sights, with a post up front and a little hole in the rear that you squint through. The problem with this is apparent in poor or bad light. I found it difficult to acquire my target with the FN’s rear sight opening. The G-3 has a rotating drum, cocked at an angle, that gives you various sizes of holes to look through depending on light conditions, plus an open V-shape, which is very handy. Combat conditions in Rhodesia, which amounted to immediate action in ambushes, didn’t usually require using your sights but an occasional long shot did.

Anyway, I would learn to love the G-3, known in its semi-automatic version as the HK-91. I bought a half-dozen of these civilian versions in 1979 when they first started becoming available here. Price then: $350.

In 1980 I acquired an M1A1 Thompson submachine gun for a previously-described operation in New York. The 1942 version of John T. Thompson’s weapon was really excellent. The original version of 1921 and ’28 was unnecessarily complicated with its H-piece and actuator. The guys at Savage simplified it with direct blowback and had to threaten to reveal the almost fraudulent aspect of the workings of the original weapon.

I lost that one to the Monterey County DA but got another dozen by finishing the 80% machined receivers from Philadelphia Ordnance and putting the rest of the parts on them. Every man ought to own a 1942 Thompson submachine gun at least once in his life. It is a man’s weapon for home defense. I don’t know of any SWAT member who would want to go into a home where the owner might have a Thompson. Shotguns are great and I highly recommend them, but there is nothing like an M1A1 Thompson. No recoil and lots of controllable lead going out.

I got the taste of this stuff in Rhodesia. We could use anything there we wanted. Some guys carried AKs, which could be a little risky due to the distinctive sound of it on full-auto, compared with our rifles. We were conditioned to open fire on that sound. They were definitely reliable and I kind of liked the original machined version, one of which I got from a Vietnam vet who smuggled it home. I had to replace the barrel which he had foolishly cut, thinking that would make it legal. The only thing about the AK-47 or the bent-steel AKM is the buttstock is too short for typical American arms and shoulders. And it’s not balanced right for carrying. The front end is too heavy compared with the rear end, and it always droops on long walks and the stock is too short to catch under your arm. But it will work under any rotten condition you can dream up.

Around the late ‘80s I started getting pretty serious about machine guns, since I’d started the militia and the whole thing about the militia was it was supposed to have whatever the military has. That meant automatic weapons. Now I wasn’t in the Charlton Heston category, although I did meet a man in Chicago whose machine gun collection was even more extensive than Heston’s. But I had Thompsons, G-3s, Stens, AKs, a couple of MG-34s, a couple of MG-3s, a couple of Browning .30s and an M2 Browning .50 caliber. All of the Brownings were mounted on my 1952 M-38 Jeep, more of which later.

I made the wonderful acquaintance of a young German genius I’ll call Hubert. He was a factory Porsche and BMW mechanic who specialized in restoring vintage motorcycles. He had a WWII R-75 German army motorcycle with sidecar, perfectly restored, that really blew my mind. His new passion was machine guns and I learned that in Germany, machine gun receivers are legal to buy but not the barrels, which is the opposite of what we have here. On his annual trips home he would buy receivers and ship them back here. That’s how I got the MG-34s and MG-3s built. And he made the sideplates for my Browning machine guns, the parts you can’t buy here.

But I wasn’t a collector. That old guy in Chicago was a collector – deluxe – but wouldn’t consider parting with one of his hundreds of great weapons for anti-totalitarian purposes. No, no, no. To me, that’s all these things are for. They’re for fighting and killing oppressors, same as in Rhodesia, in my case.

So my militia book came out in ’89 and the movement took off pretty quickly. Understand that I am not a proponent of the 2nd Amendment. To me it is a fraud with its “well-regulated militia” nonsense at the beginning. There is no such thing as a well-regulated militia. I jammed the militia right up the government’s ass because the militia clause has been used by judges since 1847 to say to Americans, “Well, I don’t see how THIS weapon could be used by the militia. Go to prison.”

So I got as many machine guns and other automatic and contraband weapons as I could afford. In 1994 I heard about something called the Militia of Montana, run by the Trochmann brothers and son in Noxon, Montana. We had just been destroyed by the Northridge earthquake in January so the insurance company moved us to Montana in March. I hooked up with the Trochmanns, congratulated them on whatever the hell they were doing, and said I was at their service. At our first big meeting with all the local guys, I distributed a dozen or so high-quality automatic weapons. I bought marine band radios for instant communications and we worked out call signs.

Not too long into this, within a month, the Trochmann office got a call from Sandpoint, Idaho, about 45 miles west, that an army convoy was approaching us on Route 200 at a high rate of speed. I rushed home, told my wife to take the kids and get the hell out of town, which she did. I called one of the guys who had an MG-34 and a thousand ready rounds of 8mm ammunition for it in drums and told him to take a position east of town by the dam. I lugged the .50 caliber Browning up from the basement (in two pieces – the barrel weighs 84 pounds!), installing it on the pedestal mount, setting the headspace, loading it with a 100 round belt and then mounting the two .30 cal Brownings, one on the dashboard and one behind the driver, loaded with 250 round belts. Two militia guys drove up and asked me not to take that vehicle out yet. I looked up my road to Route 200 and there came the convoy, going at about 20 mph above convoy speed, really hooked up. I said, Well, there they are! Follow them and let me know if they go across the bridge. I’ll be along and take them from behind if they go toward Trochmanns’ place. They said okay. The convoy was going so fast that the guys couldn’t catch ‘em but they could see that they went straight east rather than crossing the Clark Fork River. I radioed the guy out by the dam and said, If they turn around and come back for us, open up on them and I’ll get ‘em from this end. He watched expectantly with the MG-34 lined up on them as they got to the dam road and slowed down to convoy speed, about 45 mph, no doubt figuring they were out of danger! But they kept going east.

The two guys following the convoy, which was just bait to check our response, saw two new government cars with Helena plates and lots of antennae sitting at the 56 intersection, no doubt monitoring our radio discipline and actions.

The Trochmanns literally headed for the hills and wouldn’t respond to my or anyone else’s radio calls. I would learn later that they were reporting everything to an FBI agent in Missoula named Mike Houck, and to some ATF son of a bitch. Here we were, protecting them and theirs and they split. Needless to say, the feds knew all about the machine guns and never did a thing. That’s because they are gutless wonders. All I could say to the Trochmanns was, What the hell happened to you guys? It took a few more months before I got the picture.

The BBC had done a hostile interview with us a week or so earlier. When it aired in England my good friend there, Pierre de Villiers, was watching and said to his buddy, “Hey! That’s Bruce!” I had remarked in the interview out by the river that we were here to fight, no other reason, that Noxon was similar to Bosnia and would be a great place to start this whole struggle against the American Bolsheviks.

So the Bolsheviks decided to see how serious we were and we showed them. They didn’t run any more convoys through the area but the harassment from jet fighters, C-141s, Sikorsky helicopters, Apaches and other aircraft was just starting. So I did an interview in Denver saying that if this pestering and threatening didn’t stop we would shoot down any illegally low-flying aircraft. The talk-show guy said, “Do you really have the capability?” I said, “Maybe.” There were no more flyovers after that.

Point is, guns are here for one main purpose and that’s to defend against intimidation and power-grabs. You don’t need machine guns. A .25 Baby Browning is just fine at the right time. With a Baby Browning you can get a .45 and then you can keep trading up.

The Egyptians have been disarmed and are taking huge personal risks with nothing other than rocks, and have lost hundreds killed and thousands injured in a few days, just to rid themselves of a rich parasite and traitor and Bill Murray look-alike. Here we are with the world’s biggest private arsenal with the greatest opportunity to rid ourselves and the normal world of those perfumed princes of subversion and war, the Council on Foreign Relations, headquartered at 58 E. 68th Street. In other words, right on Park Avenue. This place is the fountainhead of rich parasites and traitors who are directly responsible for every nasty thing happening in this world, with no exaggeration.

What’s our excuse? Flouride? I don’t think so. It’s plain old-fashioned mind control. We’re the most heavily-armed sons of bitches on the planet and we let this bunch of panty-waists in two thousand dollar suits make the mass-murdering of foreigners our national policy, that is, done in our names.

The militia thing was premature, started as it was under Bush, Sr and coming to its peak power under Clinton, who destroyed it with his OKC operation. The American man was not yet the New American Man, impervious to such false-flag jobs done in his name. And the Egyptian man is for now an unarmed man, dependent on the sympathy and mercy of the Egyptian army, subject to slaughter by the Israeli-run state police. That’s not our situation. We don’t have to go against the army. We don’t even have to go against the police, although we might have to go against both of them plus the FBI and all the renegade parasites with all the gear we bought them. Whatever. Whoever. But we don’t have to go against them if we just take out the brains of the machine. When that homicidal club is taken down, ALL of our problems will become insignificant.

Moral of this little story: Guns are great but they are for one main purpose and that is to prevent us from having to take to the streets unarmed, dependent on the mercy of the military and police. The reluctance of the Egyptian army to fire on their own countrymen will not be shared by the sadists who have been brutalized by conditioned response and by their war crimes against the Moslems. They will treat us exactly the same. To prevent this nightmare from occurring, the ones who will give the crackdown orders must be removed from the page of history.

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