Paladin Planet: December 2011

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Straight-Up Dudes Don’t Shoot Straight Up

With New Year’s Eve (and the resultant celebration that often entails) in just a few days, the following seems very timely. It was written by an anonymous Paladin author.

The lame-brained poet wrote:

“I shot an arrow into the air.
It fell to earth, I know not where.”

He should have that arrow, bow, and quiver stuck up his nose, for the apparent permission he gives the witless among us to launch projectiles into the air to “fall to earth, they know not where.” Like this is some sort of romantic mystery as opposed to a grindingly stupid act.

Although it goes without saying that “what goes up, must come down” and “every bullet launched moves until something stops it,” we’ll say it anyway because every now and then you meet some knuckle-dragger whose Daddy didn’t teach him proper firearms handling like Thomas Jefferson recommended. And we’re not talking about the possibility of hitting a camel here; we’re talking about the US of A, a “nation of riflemen,” where everybody old enough to shoot should know better.

One astute writer noted, “Dumb asses shooting into the sky to celebrate . . . isn't something that only happens in the Middle East . . .” He’s right, you know. He also concluded, “Remember the old days when we just tolerated drunk drivers? Even though we all had a relative who had been killed by one? This is the same damn thing.”

Hard to argue with that, as well. And since friends don’t let friends drive drunk, they shouldn’t let pea-brains shoot into the air, either. Whether the person is holding the gun or not, say something. OK, he’s holding a gun, so be polite, but say something.

In a vacuum, a bullet launched straight up, would return at the same speed, accelerating downward from its apogee at the rate of 32 feet per second. But bullets fired into the air usually fall back at speeds much lower than those at which they leave the barrel, because of wind resistance, which is usually compounded by the tumbling of the projectile once its spin-stabilization gives out.

Firearms expert Julian Hatcher studied falling bullets and found that GI .30-06 bullets reach terminal velocities of 300 feet per second (90 m/s), while larger .50 BMG bullets have a terminal velocity of 500 feet per second (150 m/s) on the way back down. A bullet traveling at only 150 feet per second (46 m/s) to 170 feet per second (52 m/s) can penetrate human skin, and at 200 feet per second (60 m/s) it can penetrate the skull.

Despite these unimpressive velocities, countless people are injured, often fatally, when bullets fired into the air return to earth. The mortality rate among those struck by falling bullets is about 32 percent, compared with about 2 to 6 percent normally associated with gunshot wounds. Despite the lower velocities, the higher mortality is related to the higher incidence of head wounds from falling bullets. Except for the pea-brain who shot into the air: he’d be more likely to be hit in the butt, as that is where his head is.

A study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 80 percent of celebratory gunfire-related injuries are to the head, feet, and shoulders. In the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, a couple of people die and a couple dozen more are injured every year from celebratory gunfire on New Year's Eve, according to the CDC.

Between 1985 and 1992, the King/Drew Medical Center in Los Angeles treated some 118 people for falling-bullet injuries: 38 of them died. Kuwaitis celebrating the 1991 end of the Gulf War by firing weapons into the air caused 20 deaths from falling bullets. In July 2003, more than 20 people were reported killed in Iraq from celebratory gunfire following the deaths of Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay. In July 2007 at least four people were reported killed and 17 others wounded by celebratory gunfire in Baghdad, after the victory of the national soccer team in the AFC Asian Cup. (Sigh)

If you could fire exactly straight up — odds are good that you can’t — this would probably result in a more slowly falling projectile, as it would be more inclined to tumble, whereas one fired even in a steep arc would more likely have retained its spin stabilization, point-first orientation, and lessened air resistance. In World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam, “unpropelled” missiles of the Lazy Dog type, aerodynamically shaped and heavier than most small-arms projectiles, were dumped from aircraft, their aerodynamic shape helping them gain far greater terminal velocity. In World War I, they were dumped from dirigibles and slow-flying craft and relied on gravity, but when dumped from fast-movers they start with the speed of the aircraft and accelerate at 32 fps/sec in relation to the ground. Some World War I reports were that these could penetrate an enemy’s helmet and completely through his body, but this seems optimistic. And that arrow? It probably would have greater lethal effect than many projectiles, again because of its aerodynamic properties.

Check the Bob Tuley and Wikipedia links on celebratory firing for further info and tabulations. For the best titles on safe and effective firearms handling, check out the Combat Shooting section on the Paladin website.

Switched On or Switched Off?

by Dave Spaulding

The phrase situational awareness is thrown about frequently these days. So much so that I am concerned it may be losing its importance.

Situational awareness is a heightened state of mind directly related to a particular circumstance one may face or be facing. It’s not general alertness, which we should all possess; it’s caused by something that is happening in your presence or general area, some type of unfolding situation or circumstance that has caught your attention. You may have heard it referred to as “the hair on the back or your neck standing up” or a “gut feeling” or maybe even “women’s intuition.” It doesn’t matter what it is called, it’s that internal sense that something is not right and a greater level of attention should be directed toward it. If we do not pay such circumstances due notice, we run the risk of being caught off-guard, to be surprised.

In 1732 Thomas Fuller observed, “A man surprised is half beaten.” In 1943, German ace Erich Hartmann (read Paladin’s The Deadliest Men by Paul Kirchner for more information) said, “The pilot who sees the other first has half the battle,” which coming from a man who flew 1,000 combat missions downing 352 pilots should be heeded.

How do we remain alert as we go through our daily routine? Such awareness models as Jeff Cooper’s Color Codes andr John Boyd’s OODA Loop are excellent for explaining what awareness is and how it should be achieved but are a bit lengthy to act as a daily reminder. What I have used to remind me of the state of mind I want to be in is the simple light switch. I just ask myself, “Are you switched on or switched off?”

When the lights are switched off, light levels are reduced to mere shadows if not complete darkness. In such an environment it is difficult to make informed decisions, as our primary sense, sight, is greatly restricted. You can still hear and smell, but without the ability to see these other senses can be disconcerting. However, when the lights are switched on, it is light and bright with the ability to see in all directions making it much easier

From this moment on whenever you venture out from the security of your own home ask yourself, “Am I switched off or switched on”? Stay alert . . . stay alive.

Dave Spaulding is a retired lieutenant from the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Dayton, Ohio, where he worked in all facets of law enforcement, including SWAT, training, crime-scene investigation, undercover operations, and violent crime investigations. He is a graduate of most of the better-known shooting schools and the author of more than 1,000 articles in firearm and law enforcement publications. He is the author of the two best-selling books Defensive Living and Handgun Combatives, and has been featured in Ruger’s Tactical Tips at www.ruger.com.

End the Double Standard!

by Claire Wolfe

Picture yourself in the following situations. Then imagine the consequences:

1. You have a dog that’s specially trained to chase and attack anybody
who runs. You’re walking the dog off-leash in an area where children are playing. Predictably, a little boy runs; your dog goes after him and knocks him to the ground. Worse yet — a police officer witnesses the attack.

What happens to you and your dog?

2. You have been caught red-handed lying to federal officials about
criminal activity.

How long is your prison sentence?

3. You are a prominent and wealthy author doing a book signing in a mall. Your bodyguards overhear a man saying he is going to ask you a thorny question. When the man actually does ask his question — and perhaps touches you in some way — your bodyguards confront him and drag him off.

How much trouble are you in?

4. You make a fortune on insider trading on the stock market, which everyone knows is illegal. Your deeds become national news.

What’s your punishment?

5. You throw an explosive device into a home. It goes off as it’s designed to, permanently disfiguring an innocent woman.

What consequences do you pay?

Here are the answers:

1. No, the police officer does not shoot your attack dog. Nor does he arrest you or cite you for keeping a dangerous animal. Far from it. The police department calls it an “unfortunate accident” and praises the dog effusively. Because in this case the dog and its irresponsible dog walker are members of the department.

2. Nothing happens to you for lying to federal officials, of course. Not if you’re the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer, Eric Holder. Never mind that lesser folk routinely get hit with federal charges for doing much less.

3. And if you’re a book-signing author who also happens to be Dick Cheney, and your bodyguards are Secret Service agents, nothing happens to them or you — although the man whose First Amendment rights you violated does eventually takes his case to the Supreme Court.

4. And if you’re a member of Congress who trades stocks using the secret inside information you routinely get as part of your job, the only consequence is that you get even richer than you already were. Because what’s illegal for us peasants is perfectly okay for you.

5. Finally, you can throw all the explosive devices you like if you claim to be fighting the war on drugs even if there are no drugs or criminals in the home you’re invading. The taxpayers eventually get the tab for your irresponsibility.

These are all examples in which members of the government class get a free pass under circumstances where you or I would be in serious trouble. Grotesqueries like these can be found in the news every day.

Three of my examples involve politicians. Nobody feels much sympathy for them (especially for Holder, whose latest lies are designed to cover up some serious anti-gun machinations. Nevertheless, members of the political class are increasingly an elite to whom none of the rules apply.

Two examples involve the police, and I know a lot of people assume that police officers should get a free pass. But when police bear no consequences for harming the innocent, they get sloppier in their investigations, more brutal in their tactics, and more heavy-handed in their dealings with the public. The result is increasing violence against the innocent.

The bottom line is that our “public servants” are becoming increasingly arrogant and terrifying masters. Despite the occasional Supreme Court case or million dollar tax-paid settlement, the worst offenders aren’t paying any personal consequences.

As long as they get away with it, our lives are only going to get worse.

Claire Wolfe is the author of the Paladin books The Bad Attitude Guide to Good Citizenship, Freedom Outlaw’s Handbook, and I Am Not a Number, and a contributor to The Paladin Book of Dangerously Fun Stuff and Tough Times Survival Guide, Vol. 2.

Thursday, December 8, 2011

“Let Slip the Dogs of War”

Yesterday, Paladin Planet featured an article commemorating the 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Today, we'd like to share another World War II story that will surprise most people. It comes to us courtesy of a Paladin author who prefers to remain anonymous on the Internet, a sentiment we understand completely.

William Shakespeare was more a student of the human condition than historian, although he commonly used historical characters and contexts. When Mark Anthony stands over the corpse of Julius Caesar and vengefully calls to “Cry havoc! And let slip the dogs of war,” the allegorical plea was to remove all restraints from any troops who would avenge Caesar’s death. We have never found a reference to dogs used in war as massed combatants per se.

That oversight would change [not] early in World War II war when a wildly eccentric but well-spoken Swiss immigrant by the name of William Prestre of Santa Fe, New Mexixo, found sympathetic ears in the U.S. War Department.

During World War II, Cat Island, Mississippi, became home for the Cat Island War Dog Reception and Training Center, another site where donated family dogs were trained for military use. There is probably some sort of natural law that states, if you’re going to spend millions of desperate war bucks on a war-dog program as messed up as we describe here, you’ll do it at a place called Cat Island, named by exploring Spaniards, who found it crawling with raccoons, which they thought were cats.

In meetings with Army brass in June 1942, Prestre convinced them he could produce up to 30,000 dogs to form assault brigades to take Japanese-held jungle islands, by training dogs to selectively kill Japanese on sight, without handlers.

His scheme was to have greyhounds [of course] blitzkrieg across the beaches and go for machine gun crews. Hot on their tails [heh, heh] would be packs of Great Dane and wolfhound grunts who would then mop up the Japanese troops. The army hoped to train as many as two million dogs. Even without a Power-Point presentation, the brass could envision landing craft releasing thousands of dogs against the Japanese. When the defenders scattered in confusion, amphibious troops would land undeterred and stack the bodies. The problem became, where do we find Japanese troops for training bait? Very few Japanese soldiers were being captured.

In October 1942, a group of 25 soldiers from Company B of the 100th Infantry Battalion Separate, Nisei Hawaiian National Guardsmen, were selected at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin, and moved to Ship Island, Mississippi.

The training pretty much consisted of putting on a protective suit and abusing the animals in an attempt to get them to hate “Japanese.” Smarter than many people of the day, the dogs never saw any racial difference between troops of Japanese ancestry and anybody else.

In subsequent investigations, testimony by one Army dog handler noted that Prestre "did not know dogs or how to handle them." For instance, Prestre specified French horns to urge the dogs to assault the beaches, but these only served to confuse them—and most dogs that did make the beach were terrified by shellfire and became totally uncontrollable.

On February 2, 1943, after two disappointing exhibitions in front of the brass and millions of much-needed dollars misspent, Prestre was sent packing and his involvement in the war effort ended, but it was not an amicable divorce.

In the aftermath, one observation of the intelligence investigation into “where did we go wrong?” noted, “Prior to his departure Mr. Prestre made several threats, the gist of which were that unless the project is continued, he would make plenty of trouble for any and all who opposed him, up to and including the president . . . it is believed advisable to acquaint the FBI with his actions and attitude, and request that he be placed under surveillance if deemed necessary.”

We love the First Amendment, but mouthing veiled threats against the president in wartime really pushes the envelope.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Fatal Flaws of Attack on Pearl Harbor

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. We’d like to mark this solemn anniversary by thanking all the veterans who served both in the Pacific and European theaters during World War II and by examining the fatal flaws in the attack by Japan.

In 1940, nationalistic and militaristic pride and the successful conquest of China were driving Japan inexorably toward war with the United States, and the paper conquest of Southeast Asia through a treaty with the Vichy French gave Japan control of vast new territory that resulted in the U.S. embargo of strategic materials and seizure of Japanese assets. At this point war seemed inevitable, although many Japanese military leaders were concerned about the long-range implications of a protracted war with such an industrial powerhouse. As the storm clouds darkened, Admiral Isoruko Yamamoto expressed doubt, apprehension, even disgust over Japan’s headlong push toward conflict and observed that it would be a terrible mistake to “wake a sleeping giant.”

But a loyal commander, Yamamoto dutifully began plans to attack the American fleet, based at Pearl Harbor. Approval of the operation was given on 6 September 1941, and December 7 became “the day that will live in infamy.” Although Yamamoto viewed any attack on the United States as a strategic mistake, and hinged any hope of success on smashing our Pacific Fleet and demoralizing Washington, there were great tactical mistakes built into the attack on Pearl as well.

The attack on Pearl Harbor is often held as one of the most successful preemptive strikes in history. A candid analysis of what the attack was intended to accomplish—and how fatal tactical flaws within the attack plan made the attack fail in the initial goal and ultimately led Japan into a war it could not possibly win in the long term—belies that characterization. That the Japanese indeed caught the giant asleep is undisputable, but, alas, they wasted their only shot at crippling the sleeping giant.

The fatal flaws in the attack on Pearl? Who better to state them than Admiral Chester Nimitz, whom President Roosevelt called from a concert the night of the attack to give him command of the Pacific Fleet.

In his small volume Reflections on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Nimitz recalled arriving at Pearl to assume command on Christmas Day, 1941. After a boat tour through the wreckage of sunken battleships and naval vessels that was once our Pacific Fleet, the helmsman asked the admiral’s reaction.

Nimitz was never known as loquacious, but he was candid: “The Japanese made three of the biggest mistakes an attack force could ever make, or God was taking care of America.”   

The fatal flaws in the attack?

“[T]he Japanese attacked on Sunday morning. Nine out of every ten crewmen of those ships were ashore on leave. If those same ships had been lured to sea and been sunk—we would have lost 38,000 men instead of 3,800.
“[W]hen the Japanese saw all those battleships lined in a row, they got so carried away sinking those battleships, they never once bombed our dry docks opposite those ships. If they had destroyed our dry docks, we would have had to tow every one of those ships to America to be repaired. As it is now, the ships are in shallow water and can be raised. One tug can pull them over to the dry docks, and we can have them repaired and at sea by the time we could have towed them to America. And I already have crews ashore anxious to man those ships.
  “[E]every drop of fuel in the Pacific theater of war is in top-of-the-ground storage tanks five miles away over that hill. One attack plane could have strafed those tanks and destroyed our fuel supply. That’s why I say the Japanese made three of the biggest mistakes an attack force could make or God was taking care of America.”

A third-wave Japanese attack had been contemplated to address such matters as the fuel depot, but low on fuel himself and fearful of the American carriers missed at sea, Admiral Nagumo aboard the flagship Akagi took the Japanese task force back to Japan. And now it was too late: they had awakened the Sleeping Giant, and the decision to disengage dramatically lessened the long-term effect of the attack.

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Who Is Paladin Press?

For the next several weeks, Paladin Planet will be running a series featuring short profiles of various Paladin employees. The profiles are intended to put a face on the various people involved in the acquisition, production, marketing, sales, and distribution of Paladin books and videos. Once an employee is profiled here, we'll move their information to our Facebook page. The first in the series is owner and publisher Peder Lund.

Lately, Peder’s been popping up in some unusual places. The January issue of Playboy magazine (due to hit the newsstands mid- to late December) has an article about him, and he will soon appear in Soldier of Fortune magazine in an interview conducted by publisher Robert K. Brown. Some of you may be wondering just who this guy is.

Peder Lund started Paladin Press in 1970 with Robert K. Brown, now publisher of SOF magazine. Peder fought in the Vietnam War with Special Forces, and he is especially proud that Paladin was one of the first publishers in the country to offer books about the Vietnam War, written by Vietnam veterans themselves. He remains a staunch supporter of the First and Second Amendments and the idea of personal responsibility and accountability, and he insists that Paladin titles reflect these sensibilities. He feels very privileged to have known many supremely talented, fascinating, and exceptional authors, employees, and customers over the past 40 years.

Peder enjoys traveling the world with his wife, Sheila; sails in exotic locales; is an avid wingshooter; reads voraciously; follows the University of Colorado football team, the Denver Broncos, and the Colorado Rockies; entertains frequently, as he takes great pleasure in cooking; and remains ever hopeful that the Paladin garden will one year yield a bountiful harvest of heirloom tomatoes.

Thursday, December 1, 2011

Homesteading and Sustainability Blogs

The school of hard knocks is a good teacher. But the fast-tracks to learning are studying what has been done before that worked, and associating with those who know because they are in the arena, trying new ideas. Blogs make virtual association easy as pie, and you don’t even have to be polite while you winnow the wheat from the chaff. There are enough whiny, unproductive “greenie weenie” sites, and some so daft we wonder whose Useful Idiots they really are. We’ve gleaned some we think may be of interest to folks who are less likely to hug a tree and more inclined toward planting a tree . . . or several.

The sites below offer good ideas galore to winnow for those interested in personal and natural sustainability and homesteading. Check these out. They can be as much fun as swapping ideas down at the Grange hall: