I’m going to shovel out some opinions, here, and I will not be bothering (entirely) to support them with references and argumentation. Let me put that out front, since I am going to make some very negative assumptions about some people, and may even vent my spleen. Or, air it out, anyway.
This is some thinking and studying I did as part of an article I have not written yet (it’s been sitting in my head for over a year) about “tactical” stuff.
I still get ads for tactical stuff a-plenty, but lately they have turned just a bit more sinister. It used to be gravelly-voiced masculinity about how a real man is always ready for a hurricane, or a cougar. Both, simultaneously (the mark of a real man, plus doing all that while baking popovers) is not considered. I’ve written about this topic elsewhere – honestly, I forget where – but one time I got to do a poorly-controlled straw poll at a conference: “please raise your hand if you have ever been a normal civilian urban situation, and had to defend yourself against someone armed with a gun?” Next question: “what about a knife?” and “How many of you have used pepper spray on someone?” (a few hands). But I had about 100 people in my class, and the results were about what I’d expected: nobody had really needed to use a tactical ninja letter-opener to defend themselves against a platoon of Rhodesian SAS or anything like that.
Yet “tacticool” remains a look. The blacked-out gear and spandex may not be universally badass-looking on us all, but we simply cannot ignore the semiotics of the thing: this is supposed to be intimidating. It is supposed to symbolize that the wearer is capable of taking it, and dishing it out, too. I mean, look at that guy and all his armor except on his face and crotch, where all the bullets go. (and an expert with a samurai sword would also dispatch that goon with a single thrust) But these are grown men, who scuttle about in tacticool, as if they’re going to start laying down suppressive fire.
We all have different ideas of what constitutes a badass outfit. Back in the good old days, it was big shiny iron plates. Or, you know, something else.
How many of you dear readers have ever crossed swords with a fencing master who has trained olympians? That’s my high-water mark. [It went unbelievably badly] I’d be shocked if any of my non-AI readership has ever been in a gunfight for real. I think that the adult situation in which I most wished I had a gun handy was the not-so-well-managed encounter with a female bear on RT879 one night when I was on my motorcycle. In that moment of clarity, I remembered what most strategic geniuses know: run away. After all, I was on a perfectly good motorcycle. Because if you run away you may never have to deal with it, or someone else will. In computing it’s what we call “an optimization” – you figure out a way to leave the hard part until never. Ponder this: I could spend my whole life hauling around a “tactical walking cane” suitable for beating up the broad cultural stereotype fentanyl addict, and it would do exactly no good against mama bear. No refunds.
I have much love for that image, because the AI did a pretty fair job on the “tacticool” ‘operator’ in his perma-press work clothes, and stuck goggles and some weirdness on the grenadier’s kit. Also the combination beard-busby is a look we need to bring into style now that I am past the age of military impressment. Or should I say “I am no longer impressed”? What’s funny is: imagine that the guy on the left is ICE. Imagine the guy on the right is line infantry of the old guard. A fight between those two would sound like: “(click) Uhhhhhhh” The action begins when the ‘operator’ raises his gun, which is loaded and ready and the (click) is when the experienced infantryman knocks the ‘operator’s gun out of line and runs him through with the bayonet. The point I am trying to make, here, is that a lot of these ICE guys are doing a fun job of cosplaying badasses, but an actual badass would not feel a need to discuss it afterward with their therapist. Setting aside the clothing, a roman infantryman from LegioX would look at that guy and his short sword would do its usual work. After all, it’s monday.
Don’t get me wrong – I love fashion, and I really like military fashion. I forget if I posted a photo of my reenactor perfect chasseurs of the imperial guard pelisse but it’s fun to wear, and watch pedestrians get out of my way with furrowed eyebrows. That’s what I’m getting at, here: if I walk down the street in napoleonic kit, I’m a weirdo. If my neighbors had a classical education and I walked down the street dressed as an Edo period Shinsengumi and wearing both swords, they would walk quickly to someplace else. The same way a lot of people do, when they see ICE.*
[By the way, here is an anodyne for watching ICE in action: imagine the expression of a LegioX centurion watching those guys. “oh my god what is this shit? Don’t they know how to break a few skulls?”] I’m glad that ICE is so incompetent. Perhaps I’ll go into that more but in the meantime, as a placeholder, a Vietcong mortar-team could put an 81mm round between any of the ICE idiots standing there in a close-packed line trying to scare Portland’s population of inflateable frogs. There is a point in that: in the ICE guys’ minds, they are warriors. In the mind of someone like Sazz, [stderr] they’re way too grouped up and their command hierarchy is obvious from their deployment. Writing that makes my blood run cold because I know what Sazz meant when he said something like that – these guys are so dangerous they couldn’t even hurt themselves. He was full of one-liner putdowns like that, which mostly featured Marines.
I’m belaboring my point: these guys have mistaken dressing like a badass for being a badass. Reality does not require detailed interrogation to teach us that badasses crop up at random and anyone getting rambunctious should take that into account. I do not know how many drunks in taverns were talking shit and looked up and saw the completely un-upset gaze of a former centurion. Or a chasseur of the Guard, or whatever. This is an important movie trope in American popular cinema and it’s some of the most pernicious bullshit: because someone “serious” (in the language of The Professional) is in the room, random violent thugs don’t recognize it and get hurt very badly. What a complete load of hooey. A “bad guy” with any practice is also going to recognize “the eye of the tiger” or whatever it is, and won’t start a bar-fight that gets them and all their friends crippled. Nor will a retired centurion because why ruin an evening?
I am not a serious martial artist; I’m a strategist (warriors take their orders from me) anyhow, youtube recently fed me up a bunch of videos of Jake Gyllenhal as some ring-fighter who runs around demolishing people who are apparently a) fighters b) exceptionally stupid. I mean if you were going to fight Bruce Lee wouldn’t you take one look at how he moves and start having a lumbago attack? If I found myself in a potential combat situation with Bruce Lee, I’d be perfectly happy to look like a coward, because, when I am confronted by someone who moves like that – I am! Only an idiot doesn’t seek a favorable resolution. (“Wow, obviously you’ve got some serious workout-time, and if you’re a fighter, I can tell right away that I’m not a worthy opponent, so fight my friend Fred, here…” <– note the idea of “I am not a worthy opponent” embeds some toxic masculinity for you)
[I have actually been in a potentially combative situation, once, in a bar in Croatia where alcohol was flowing and a Serb and a Marine started obviously measuring eachother. I just made sure they each got more tequila and sat down to enjoy it, and the issue evaporated as they often do. By the time that food was done and the check called for, they were blood brothers.]
This is really roundabout. I’m saying that I think the ICE guys, who dress up in their tacticool, are worse than ${manhood-insulting-trope} – let’s be honest about some things: they are dressing that way to appear big and scary. They are dressing that way because, I suppose, that armor plate vest helps them suck their belly in. They are dressing that way because they hold their manhood cheap, and what they really really want to do is lay down some overwhelming force on a weaker opponent. If you are a horrible and cruel person, like I am, you can engage such people in discussions about military honor, bushido, and manliness, without quite saying that you think Kusunoki Masahige wouldn’t let them polish the teeth of his wife’s pet cat. They want to engage in overwhelming force because that’s the only kind they think that they are capable – it’s not a strategic choice it’s simple cowardice.
You know who scares me? The guy who shows up at a street brawl wearing a clown suit. Nobody with that self-confidence is incompetent, and I’d back the hell away because they might be supremely dangerous.
Cowardice has a lot to do with why American popular culture has turned toward sniper chic. As a guy who fired thousands of .308 boat-tail lake city at 400M targets, I recognize it right away – it’s the “thousand yard stare” except it’s not (Sazz had that) it’s some creepy kid from the suburbs who is afraid to get in a fight and thinks 300 yards is a good distance. Strategically, I give them points but they’re still just yapping puppies. When that shitty movie about serial sociopath killer whatsisface the sniper came out, I was thinking “oh god the tacticool crowd will eat this up.” And, they did. Suddenly cop squads started cropping up sniper teams as if they’re in fucking Fallujah. This is all chickenshit.
In terms of warrior ethos, a grenadier from the Old Guard would have casually said, “I’ve killed better men than you” if they bothered to notice the chair-warrior or the ICE agent. Personally, I’d love to see the face of an ICE agent if some Grenadier started telling them about the battle of Eylau. Unless they started masturbating furiously, of course. What else are these assclowns doing, but trying to look a lot more dangerous and scary than they are? [I am not a fan] I enjoyed the old “Dirty Harry” tropes where Clint Eastwood gets in gunfights wearing a snappy courduroy jacket. The whole point of those lousy movies is about fashion and proper clothing for violence. Or something. I’m pretty sure there’s a good dissertation on popular culture regarding fashion in Tombstone or one of the infinite number of Bond movies.
“I can’t see a fucking thing. Where did they go? I’m just gonna shoot something OK?”
That is the weird, and stupid, aspect of American popular culture: there are unacknowledged clothing cues for violence, that say “I am a tough guy” and they change over time. When Jake Gyllenhal takes off his shirt, we are supposed to go: “oh, that’s a tough guy” and only stupid NPCs tangle with him. My generation reacts the same way when Bruce Lee expands his back muscles like a cobra’s hood. “Yeah, this guy practices.” I think that’s a lot of what’s going on with the ICE idiots in various cities: they expect people to be cowed by their badass clothing and they are really pissed off that it’s not working. Meanwhile as a supporter of LGBTQ, I have to say “come out of the closet, it’s OK, you can turn that into positive play with a partner and it’ll be great!” At my age do you think I can’t tell? These little authoritarian soldiers put their gestapo/SD black uniforms on at home, and look at the mirror and feel unmanly because they haven’t killed anyone, yet. They don’t understand that, right now, they are part of the dominant culture so they are adopting the popular style. That tacticool bullshit they are wearing just shows the bullshit that is in their hearts, really.
I do not know if there were weird perverts in imperial Rome, who sneakily dressed like Lictors, or something, in the privacy of their homes, but this whole ICE/tacticool thing annoys me simply because the aesthetics are bad. I don’t want to go talk to any ICE while they are deployed but, seriously, why are they wearing bricklayers’ kneepads? Are they going to weed my lawn? Why the elbow pads? I’ve never fucked a guy; are they expecting to get down on all fours for some butt-slamming action, Chuck Tingle-style? Most laughable of all, as a weapons maven [This is allowed; I make weapons, I can critique them] they’re pathetic: they are carrying paintball guns. I don’t care if they’re loaded with teargas paintballs, I’ve got stuff in my gun safe that would legitimately make an ICE mall cop weep with envy. I just don’t wear it out on the street because all that steel is heavy. And there are legal issues. [Out here I can legally carry concealed a .45 with a silencer and steel core rounds, but a katana is iffy] [America is stupid!] I think a lot of what is going on is that the ICE agents have mistaken their fashion choices for actuality, when they are wearing movie props.
Let me suggest you see Sicario. Or parts thereof. The soundtrack is great, [for both 1 and 2], but the actual movie is, uh… what the fuck is it? Oh, right, it’s the plot of every action American movie made: there are bad guys and there are frustrated good guys who want to take the fight to the bad guys, so they ignore the law and go on a killing spree under cover of authority.
In the case of Sicario, Josh Brolin and Benicio Del Toro do a good job acting like sociopathic badasses, badguys, whatever, it makes no difference. If the reason we are to dislike the badguys is because they are ruthless killers, Del Toro’s character (played with a great downbeat aplomb) is more ruthless and badass and spoiler: he’s so ruthless he shoots the drug lord’s family in front of him, lets it sink in, then shoots him. Oh. That’s what goodguys do. It’s as if the Trump administration mistook this beautifully shot and scored testosterone-kill-fantasy for a documentary. In one scene, the goodguys decide to kill a bunch of (as I used to say:) “broad ethnic stereotypes” of tattooed hispanic gang members, and they ninja out of their cars in a traffic jam, dressed the way ICE agents do, now, and kill a bunch of badguys, as goodguys do. This is what’s stewing down in the insufficiently-used crotches of ICE agents: they want to be ruthless avengers of wrong, killers for rightness, badasses, scary dudes.
They’re not, of course. They cluster up so one grenade would take down a whole file, their snipers are easy to pick out because they’re lazily positioned on rooftops (OMG who teaches these kids!?) and, uh, they’re carrying paintball guns. Sure, they could become scary, the second they load or cycle a real gun, but if you’re looking at 20 ICE agents you’re looking at 20 casualties in under 2 seconds of disciplined fire.
The dialectic – the dividing line – is that these assholes are cosplaying as badasses and are angry that they are not universally being respected as badasses. Because they don’t understand that “being respected as a badass” means being shot in the head, from a distance, with no warning. OK, I see you, I realized that you are dangerous, so you’re dead. I am constantly cringing at those ICE guys. And, oh my god, their leader – he’d be so much happier if he just came out of whatever fantasy world of sexualized violence he dwells in. Like many perverts** his outside life is an unsatisfying phantom of what he really wants to be doing. Many of them need counseling, except for the ones who are just there for the money, to which I say: there were a lot of paid troops with Crassus at Cannae; when things go south don’t cry.
Here I feel I ought to link a few clips from Sicario, and some clips of ICE, but it feels so tedious to me now. Oh, OK:
Look familiar? Fucking ICE is cosplaying Sicario. They mistook a shitty potboiler for a documentary.
(* Fan/not fan of the shinsengumi. I will say, unequivocally, that those were some guys who put their shit on the line behind their mostly stupid beliefs. But, see, when a katana expert believes one thing, and you believe another, and you’re standing in the sun looking at eachother, you need to work on your mental and political flexibility. If you have not seen When the Last Sword Is Drawn I highly recommend it. It’s not a masterpiece but it’s close, but it explores beautifully the kind of relationships that form in a time of political turbulence where neighborhoods are fighting battles with katana and mortars outside of the pub. I admit I do fantasize about seeing the Proud Boys riot against the shinsengumi. I could handle the blood, I swear. In fact, I happened to see Charlie Kirk get shot nearly live – before they started editing it – and it was fascinating to explore my own reaction. First off was: “a lucky miss” nobody aims there and secondly “wow!” as you could literally see the guy’s brain shut down when the blood pressure dropped. BOOM, lights out. Anyhow, if you’re going to feel bad for shitheels like him, just remember that during the Meiji period, Japanese politics was often done with the edge of a katana. What happened to Kirk sucked, but could have sucked way worse.) (For a better movie about Japanese politics in the Meiji restoration, try Shogun Assassin, upsettingly played by Toshiro Mifune)
(** “perverts” is a disapproved term but I am using it here to be insulting)
I see previews for Sicario 3. Wow! Let me guess, the plot will be more: facile and naive revenge, except there will be a surprise twist, like some betrayal and then back to facile and naive revenge. I’m not against revenge, for the record, but this stuff is just fucking ridiculous: some guy steals your car and kills your dog so you kill 420 people to get to them for revenge. 420 people who were just time clock-punching members of Non Player Characters’ Local #465.
I think the genesis of this is simple: Americans (and Canadians, and probably everyone else but I don’t have much personal knowledge) get something like 90% of their ideas of how the world works from fiction media. Even people who do know better through training and experience, like cops themselves, often form their ideas of how their profession should work from their entertainment diet. Dick Wolfe figured this out when he started making Law and Order, it and its successor shows all know what agendas they want to push, and boy howdy does it work.
I will plug again the (flawed, dated) book “Warrior Dreams” which I think cataloged the phenomenon that would become what we see now, way back in the 90s. There is also some interesting feedback mechanisms where things that look good on screen are fed back into the culture: “tough guys look like XXX, because that dehydrated muscle-tone that Hugh Jackman displayed when he was barely able to stand looked great under that lighting.”. As a digression, I watched an amazing youtube video from a musical historian who discussed the real difficulty they have trying to put historically accurate music and instruments into movies. People just refuse to accept that Romans had bagpipes, and people will bitch if you include them. I think this is called the “Tiffany Effect”. As a result, people’s consumption of entertainment media that is deliberately ahistorical to cohere with their flawed understanding further reinforces that flawed understanding.
My impression of real special forces guys on those times I met them was: athletic, compact, shorter than you’d expect, extremely focused and mission oriented. With different life events, most of these guys would have ended up as high-level competitive athletes (or were, but injured out of that and found something else to obsess about – ie, special forces). Doesn’t film well unless you have a great character actor, so usually it’s the bodybuilder types who get the role instead.
With cops and SWAT, there is all of that in play, but also the simple fact that SWAT/ERT work is fun and exiting and you get paid to spend time playing guns with your buddies and working out, instead of all that messy actual police work with it’s complicated personal interactions and paperwork. Full-time swat guys have a pretty sweet gig, it’s basically all hanging out with your bros at public expense and occasional high-adrenaline deployments. The general-duty cops who get stuck guarding the perimeter of your high-profile ops are all jealous. I was. (Disclosure: I washed out of ERT selection on day three with a fucked knee.)
The kneepads are an interesting touch. Guys I served with who went to Afghanistan definitely wore them in some contexts, but unless your actual job description is likely to include serious urban firefighting, the running/agility penalty is likely going to outweigh the ‘comfortable during prolonged kneeling’ advantages they can provide. I think I still own a set of cadpat camo green kneepads, might have used them once while setting tile.
It doesn’t appear that ICE has any kind of uniform policie or central kit distribution, so I guess newly hired bigots go off with whatever kit allowance they’re given and buy as much 3XL tactical gear as they can find on Temu.
@mjr:
Can you comment on this, that has been bothering me now for a year and a half: you are in a country that worships guns, a country where a LOT of people have and regularly shoot long guns, guns that are more than capable of reliably killing a man at a range of 300 yards even in the hands of a relative novice and certainly capable of doing so in the hands of anyone with even a modicum of preparation.
A LOT of people have served in the military, and understand that 300 yards is not a “good distance”, it’s pretty much the most basic distance at which you’re supposed to be able to reliably kill a man.
Granted, for dramatic reasons, media portrays gunfights (and fighter jet encounters, and space battles) as happening at MASSIVELY reduced ranges, because if they happened realistically it would be tedious in the extreme to watch – oh, the fighter pilot pushed a button, and then a minute or two later a hundred miles away a different fighter that the first one couldn’t even SEE blew up. Oh, the spaceship accelerated a rock to 0.1% lightspeed and eight years later the enemy planet experienced a mass extinction event. Oh, the sniper sat still for four hours then fired four rounds at a what looked like a smudge on his scope, and several seconds later two bad guys died.
But there are definitely enough people in that country who KNOW, from personal experience, that it’s possible, indeed it is everyday infantry practice to engage targets at a distance where you can’t see the expressions on their faces. There are enough people who KNOW that 300 yards is kid’s stuff, literally – CHILDREN in your country shoot well enough to kill men three hundred yards out.
Yet, eighteen months on, and in reference to an event where an adult using an assault rifle fired eight rounds “at” a target just 130 metres away and DIDN’T kill it, the Wikipedia entry for it still calls it an “assassination attempt”, as though he wasn’t deliberately aiming instead for the two people he DID kill. My experience shooting at targets at that distance is that I’d have been in serious trouble if I couldn’t hit a COIN thirty times with thirty rounds. Yet nobody seems to have made anything of this – all the news reports just glossed over the LITERALLY incredible incompetence of the marksmanship, as though it was not in any way suspicious or deliberate.
I get that the average person in the street isn’t in any way bothered by the phrase “police sniper”, as though the lads standing in plain sight less than 100 metres from a target have anything in common with an actual sniper. I get that the average person in the street gets their firearm knowledge from “John Wick” and similar. But in a country where there are as many guns as people, you’d think there’d be enough gun-fondlers in the media for at least ONE of them to look at those numbers (range: 130 metres; rounds fired: 8; number of kill shots on highest-value target: zero) and go “hang the fuck ON”. And yet the silence on this is deafening – to the point that there’s not even any audible conspiracy-theory muttering going on, in a country STILL obsessing over JFK. It’s really weird. Can you comment on this please, mjr? I’m curious what you think went down here, because my read is that that was no assassination attempt, because it’s not credible to me that at that range, in those lighting conditions and weather, that anyone not HEAVILY incentivised to miss would even be capable of doing so.
Reality of special forces isn’t very photogenic. I must say while I was slightly disappointed, I wasn’t much surprised when it was revealed that “Bravo Two Zero” was mostly fantasy entirely dreamed up by Steven “Andy McNab” Mitchell. With one exception, all of the ex-SAS guys I’ve encountered fit your description. The other was just taller than the others, and very very soft spoken, as though apologising for his height.
@sonofrojblake,
I think you’re woefully misunderstanding what Americans actually do with the guns they own. Mostly they don’t actually ‘practice’ or ‘train’ with them. Some Americans ‘go to the range’ and shoot their guns from time to time, but very rarely with any kind of discipline or focus. They just blast off whatever rounds they have, hit whatever they hit, and go home satisfied. I’d bet you good money that more than 90% of the long guns in the US have never been fired at ranges exceeding 100m in any kind of rigorous or disciplined fashion. There are definitely some good long range shooters in that country, but judging from the reactions to the (close range) obvious miss on Charlie Kirk, most Americans have no idea what a long gun can do with minimal practice.
As for the SAS, never met one. But every single one of the Royal Marines I met in training was an absolute madman. I don’t know what the UK does to their soldiers, but it produces some very odd results.
I don’t own a firearm, and don’t want that responsibility.
But, it some times come up in work or other circles that I was prior enlisted, and i get questions as if I’m the local “firearms expert”.
And the scary thing is, I’m probably suitable to most of the questions asked. I tell people that they really need to think about not walking around in headphones, on their phone, tired, inebriated, more then they need to worry about carrying “for self defense”
For some reason, people really don’t like that response…
I can’t count the times I’ve tried to explain the difference twixt handguns and rifles, or that bolting a scope onto a firearm isn’t going to automatically make you any more accurate if you don’t have the basics down…
And, yeah, it’s just weird how people get when there is an assassination attempt at more than 20 yards or so… really shows that a lot of “gun people” really don’t actually practice/train much…
Lol. Of course it was. For one thing, the SAS are (or at least were*) the most famously secretive (now there’s a concept!) unit in the British military, to the extent that even the colour of their berets was secret. For another, Britain is a place where a civil servant can’t publish a memoir without being subject to government censorship. And suddenly 3 members of the same SAS unit are publishing books about the same recent and hugely controversial operation? Sure.
The only question is to what extent those books are merely fantasy, as opposed to propaganda.
* I strongly suspect that the actual SAS are still just as secretive as ever, it’s just that somebody has figured out that mountains of bullshit make for better cover than mere silence. I also don’t think it’s a co-incidence that we get shows like “SAS: Rogue Heroes” about what a great (and handsome!) bunch of fun-loving war criminals they were back in WWII at exactly the same time that they’re facing accusations of war crimes in more recent and morally-complex conflicts… But then, I’m a cynic.
@snarkhunter, 3: yeah, fair enough. I guess it doesn’t occur to me that anyone would spend that kind of money on a tool/toy and not even bother to learn to use it.
@Dunc, 5:
As I recall at the time the UNstated concern from the MoD at the time was rather the opposite. Until the Iranian embassy siege hardly anyone outside the Army were even aware the SAS existed – you couldn’t just join it, you already had to be in the army to apply. The televised breaking of the siege blew the top off it (and caused a lot of completely unsuitable people to apply), but even then the impression they liked to give was of a tiny number of borderline superhumans*. “Bravo Two Zero”‘s sin was to humanise them, to reveal that yeah, they were just blokes, that they were capable of making stupid mistakes and they couldn’t run a hundred miles through a desert in one night carrying fifty kilos of gear each.
* my direct experience of men I know to have been in the SAS – at least three of them – corresponds to this characterisation, though. When I was in the reserves I thought I was doing reasonably well on the basic fitness test – three miles to be run in less than 25 minutes. I was in my mid twenties, and could get round in 21. And every single week I was overtaken by one of our recruit training team, who’d finish in 15. That would have been slightly demoralising if he’d been around my age, but he was in his mid-fifties. Bod only knows how fast he could have done it if he didn’t smoke. The only comparable experience was seeing Billy Bland once, running along the Helvellyn ridge some time in the 90s. Some people ARE superhuman.
Tactical Crumper
So the military force we shuld really fear is the Vatican’s Swiss Guard?
Thoughts on the Last Samurai movie? Yeah, the Tom Cruise one?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Samurai
Morbid curiosity. Saw it as a kid & replayed on telly a week or three ago..
SteveoR@#8:
So the military force we should really fear is the Vatican’s Swiss Guard?
Swiss mercenary landsknechts were the terror of Europe in the renaissance. The vatican guard detail are actually serious badasses and carry modern weapons hidden in their kit – I believe Czech 9mm Skorpion submachine guns or mini Uzis.
They train hard and are legendarily professional in the special operations community.
@7 Crumper => Crumpet
Supporters of LGBTQ can tout their allegiance with Tactical Rainbow weapons
Not to be confused with AGM-136 Tacit Rainbow, a loitering anti-radiation missile.
Fear the Clown
Earlier this year I joined in a protest outside a Tesla dealership, literally on Main Street, and came face-to-face with a 20-something guy in black leather “armor” (shin guards, shoulder pads, etc – even he wasn’t nuts enough to wear full battle rattle for hours in the Florida sun).
The gear was absurdly unnecessary against a bunch of retirees carrying poster-board signs. I scoped out a few weak points on general principles and hung around close for a little while just in case some fool tried to provoke him, and somehow kept a straight face: his outfit was impeccable – not a scratch or scuff visible anywhere. The combat vets I told this story to later all cracked up.
@sonofrojblake,
I think most of them ARE using the toys for their intended purposes: for some people it’s a kind of gender-affirming totem, for others it serves as a prop in various power/revenge fantasies that they entertain while they clean and fire the thing. Dedicated practice is boring, but punching holes in paper targets at point blank range is fun and satisfying.
Don’t mistake me though: while many Americans (and some Canadians) think of guns as a cool toy you hang on the wall, lots do practice with them as well. Not a majority by any means, but they’re definitely out there. The media just usually doesn’t bring gun-perverts on as talking heads to discuss the actual logistics of mass shootings or assassination attempts, might come across as unseemly or just not dramatic enough as some hysterical person claiming that the C-Kirk shooting was a masterpiece that could only have been done by a trained sniper.
Back in the part of my life where I had to carry a pistol, I thought it would be responsible to practice with it so I joined several regional ‘practical pistol’ competitive groups. Holy fuck, the incredible degree of coded racial bullshit you’d see in those places. Most of the guys who plan the tournaments and competitions are overweight, white, middle-aged failures with little to no life outside of their gunsport. So you’d get the tournament spec and see a round described something like
There were worse ones too… can’t think of them offhand but some of them had racial sexual violence overtones “You have to defend your wife from gang members/traffickers”.
Now, Canada doesn’t HAVE concealed carry except in some very rare cases (diamond couriers, for example) so I found myself spending time with people who were enthusiastically training for scenarios that just wouldn’t actually happen in their lives. People very exited by the possibility that they might ‘get’ to defend themselves with lethal force. I’m sure many of them would be joining ICE were they American, desperate to engage a ‘thug’ in righteous combat. Those people gave me the ick.
ICE should hope that they never ever run into Ukraine war veterans. An RPG-7 warhead or claymore mine fixed to a quadcopter is pretty accurate. And suprisingly hard to stop.
FWIW, the most badass bloke I’ve met was a cousin my dad and I met on our trip to the old country in the early nineties. On the surface, nothing special about him. Not tall, not ripped, not aggressive. He’d been in Spetsnaz for his military service, but I don’t think that’s what ‘made’ him. I suspect he was chosen for Spetsnaz because of his quiet confidence. Some people can just project “don’t mess with me” without any obvious effort. And he’d segued nicely from armed forces to the black market after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Wish I’d kept in touch with him.
Sad to see so many people playing soldier in such a macabre charade, but the flavor is very familiar if one recalls the history of fascism.
There’s a book that tells it very well, “Marcia su Roma e dintorni” by Emilio Lussu, but I don’t know if an English translation is available.
The subject matter is the same discussed here, only time shifted: a WW1 veteran butts heads with the warrior cosplayers of the time and is very unimpressed. As a survivor of the horrendous trench warfare on the Asiago plateau (described in another excellent book of his, “Un anno sull’ altipiano”) he was distinctly blasé about a those guys in black shirts and funny hats.
And mind you, when the for-realsies war came along, those chesty blackshirts became notorious only for running away from the enemy. Their cowardice was proverbial and their only motivation was to stay as far from the front as possible.
I don’t think I ever met any “bad ass” but I had a French teacher in high school who was absolutely terrifying.
Gentleman in his fiftys, probably, about 174 cm (~ 5′ 6″ maybe) a bit stooped and a good 75 kg.
Rumour was that he had spent much of WWII as an assassin with the French Resistance. I don’t know if this was true but I did hear another teacher say that he still had nightmares about being tortured by the Germans.
I tended to believe the assassin story after I made a translation mistake. I had meant to write “bracelet”. He explained in a rather familiar way, that I was talking about a wrist brace that helped when you were stabbing someone.
When he was doing a study endowment at JHU, my father hosted Axel Von Dem Bussche. [wik] I don’t know what a badass actually is, but I wish he was around so I could talk to him about these combat cosplayers, he knew the type. As a classical Prussian officer, he could radiate a beam of disdain that could vaporize a panzer from a kilometer away. I don’t think he ever wore “tacticool” and only wore his iron cross (Knight’s cross with swords) with his dress uniform – which, understandably, I never saw him in. To me, he was a thoughtful, sweet, soft-spoken, and incredibly insightful old man. Whenever I think of badasses, or make a comment like I did above about “clustering up”, I remember long chats with Axel. In retrospect, I think he was being very generous with his time, talking to a wet-behind-the-ears wanna-be military historian. He told me to find a job that pays well, not history. Badass? He was a major commanding panzergrenadiers at Kursk, the time he got his leg crippled, and he was carrying a briefcase of explosive in the wolf’s lair when Von Stauffenberg’s went off, first. But I don’t think he was a badass. He never projected intimidation. One thing that I will always remember was when he was going back to Berlin and we drove him to BWI airport to see him off, he went through the metal detector and it started gonging like a mad thing. “Do you have any metal, sir?” Axel rolled up his right pants leg, snapped to attention and boomed out in a parade-ground voice, “American Bullets installed in a German Leg by Russians at Kursk in 1943” – they waved him through, white-faced. I guess that most of the men like that have gone into the ground. He was a huge influence on me. And say what you will of the nazis, they did not hand out double iron crosses to just any asshole.
Our first conversation always warms my soul. We were relaxing by the fireplace, trading facts about eachother, and he asked what I was studying in school. “Psychology” I said. He snorted, “If they ever figure anything useful out, come brief me.” Obviously, I never did.
sonofrojblake@#2:
Can you comment on this, that has been bothering me now for a year and a half:
Yup but not tonight. I promise I will. I also owe Dunc a thoughtful comment. I am grateful for your patience.
SteveoR@#9:
Thoughts on the Last Samurai movie? Yeah, the Tom Cruise one?
Movies in that vein are always problematic. They’re impossible to make without short-shrifting some things involving (almost always) swordplay and sometimes romance.
I thought Cruise did his usual fine job of being Tom Cruise, and overall the movie was OK. I ignore the swordplay and think of it as a movie about the arrival of European weapons technology in a martial civilization that had isolated itself for a while. If you look at it that way, it’s pretty freakin’ good. The Japanese were dealing with a problem that was completely blowing their minds: it turned out that isolating the country didn’t make them safer, it made them backward. So there was intense and literally incredibly violent debate about what to do. If you’ve seen Kagemusha (and if you haven’t, I recommend it) the Battle of Nagashino (at the end of the movie) was always in everyone’s mind: massed muskets behind palisades blowing ranks of screaming samurai into a pink mist, with no skill barrier other than learning to reload. It was a shock to the culture comparable to learning that the entire “wild west” was actually all done with rubber band guns.
In Shogun and The Last Samurai and other movies, there is a trope where some white guy (culturally white guy) shows up in Japan and has to survive the tremendous odds that someone would just flick his head off to make him go away. Obviously, that would ruin the movie. So the directors start to integrate the main character into the plot of Japanese politics of the time (Shogun: the rise of Tokugawa Ieyasu) (The Last Samurai: the Satsuma Rebellion, I guess, or the Meiji Restoration anyhow) – since these movies are made for American audiences, the authors have to have a love interest and always seem to cook up the clever idea of having a highly placed Japanese noble-woman fall in love with a barbarian. Basically, it’d be like if Ceteswayo went to London (he did!) and met Queen Elizabeth (he did!) and she fell head over heels in love with him. (they did not) The idea is ridiculous in a lot of ways but I think that’s a pretty good similarity – a Japanese feudal lord’s wife or daughter simply would not fall in love with a handsome white guy.
Then there’s the swordplay. In Clavell’s book Shogun he tries to get it sort of right. Blackthorne runs afoul of one of the the Japanese, who starts yelling at him, then approaches him with his hand on the grip of his katana. In samurai culture, that’s like holding a cocked pistol pointed between someone’s eyes. One does not do this lightly, nor does one back down easily. Clavell gets it right: Blackthorne has been practicing swordsmanship but knows that he hasn’t got a chance of surviving if he even twitches his hand, so he composes himself and decides that all he’s going to try to do is see if his last act can be to get the blade out, and maybe nick the samurai a bit. The fight is averted. Yay. I thought it was gracefully handled and realistic.
In The Last Samurai we get to see Cruise attempting to cross bokken with one of the samurai, and getting a good thumping in return. I don’t think a samurai would do that to a guest like Cruise because europeans were unpredictable, but also it was pretty shameful to get his ass kicked so thoroughly on primetime, and I think a samurai would have started getting embarrassed for Cruise and trying to think of a good way out of the situation that did not involve anyone dying. But that’s if it was a smart samurai. There were also dumb, violent ones, and then the movie would have ended about there.
Imagine a movie where a farmer gets really pissed off, goes to Sparta, and trains with the king’s guard and even crosses swords with one of them and is in one piece afterward. Or an orphaned kid joins a roman legion and fights through the whole battle of Alesia and comes out fine, maybe killing a gaul or two. Or some farmer joins Henry’s archers at Agincourt and doesn’t shoot the guy in front of him by accident.
The weapons-arts were highly specialized and often extremely trained. An honored guest in a samurai castle could train for a year with a katana, and be able to die elegantly, not flailing about looking stupid. Like Blackthorne: “well, I’ll see if I can scratch the guy.” The problem is if you train 5 years, or 10, the other guys are also training 5 or 10 years, too, so they’re always a life-time ahead of you until age cripples them.
Also, I don’t think a typical samurai would have thumped extremely hard on Cruise’s character because they all knew what a “revolver” was, and Europeans had a bad habit of losing their minds and wasting all the years you spent learning the sword. It (heh) cuts both ways.
My interpretation was that it is more about European (military) organization; conscript armies organized by a strong central government. And maybe also mass production methods necessary to equip such armies.
“But that’s if it was a smart samurai. There were also dumb, violent ones, and then the movie would have ended about there.”
we should do a remake with that one instead
rsmith@#23:
My interpretation was that it is more about European (military) organization; conscript armies organized by a strong central government.
You are right; that is the macro picture. The micro picture is “what?! our swords – their muskets, WTF!” (When The Last Sword is Drawn has a great scene about this)
sonofrojblake@#2:
(with my gun nut hat on)
A LOT of people have served in the military, and understand that 300 yards is not a “good distance”, it’s pretty much the most basic distance at which you’re supposed to be able to reliably kill a man.
Correct. When I did rifle qualification at basic training (Ft Dix, summer class of 1983) we shot and practiced against targets at 25 yards, 50, 100, and 300. Minimum qualification is 23 out of 40; Expert qualification is 35 or more out of 40. When I qualified I hit 42 out of 40, so I came out as Expert. [That was awkward; I cheated because why not? But it was easily explained by hypothesizing out loud that maybe the guy in the pit next to me got confused and hit my target a time or two. All the range cadre knew I was a good shot so I got the Expert pin. Woo hoo!] One of the interesting things was that a lot of the guys failed, even though we spent 2 weeks on the range every day, basically engaging the same targets for 6hr/day. How does one fail? Easy: you freak yourself out. I was surprised that basic training more or less ignore psychological aspects but Sgt Flores explained that basic training is really more “weed out utter idiots” and in your first day in a combat zone you figure all that shit out. Since then I have read a few histories that touch on typical military training, and that’s pretty much it – mixing veterans and green troops and carefully breaking them in is more important than sitting on the range. Anyhow, it really surprised the hell out of me that some of the guys shot just fine but did horribly on the qualifications – but then I realized I went to a “college prep school” that had exams and public speaking and we had all developed a fine sense of not giving a shit. So my attitude toward all of this, especially my shooting, was fast and loose – consequently, I did really well.
Granted, for dramatic reasons, media portrays gunfights (and fighter jet encounters, and space battles) as happening at MASSIVELY reduced ranges, because if they happened realistically it would be tedious in the extreme to watch – oh, the fighter pilot pushed a button, and then a minute or two later a hundred miles away a different fighter that the first one couldn’t even SEE blew up
Also – it doesn’t fit on the frame very well. War movies that try to be realistic almost always have to adopt the trope of jumping back and forth between the shooter and the shot (e.g.: “Saving Private Ryan”). That becomes a huge part of the narrative and is a great way to build tension – and also creates a really contradictory expectation in everyone’s mind.
Oh, the spaceship accelerated a rock to 0.1% lightspeed and eight years later the enemy planet experienced a mass extinction event. Oh, the sniper sat still for four hours then fired four rounds at a what looked like a smudge on his scope, and several seconds later two bad guys died.
Militarily it may be enough to take the miss. Someone suddenly realizes that their safe spot isn’t, and that affects their tactical deployment considerably. Sazz told me about a time when they had one artillery hotshot who got in a bet with the scout/snipers regarding what he could hit with a 150mm howitzer. He picked a likely spot, aimed a bunch, and fired a spotting round: bang on. Then, they left the gun zeroed on that spot for several weeks until someone saw a small group of enemy observers at that spot, looking at them. 3 150mm high explosive rounds appeared out of a clear sky and vaporised the observers.
But there are definitely enough people in that country who KNOW, from personal experience, that it’s possible, indeed it is everyday infantry practice to engage targets at a distance where you can’t see the expressions on their faces. There are enough people who KNOW that 300 yards is kid’s stuff, literally – CHILDREN in your country shoot well enough to kill men three hundred yards out.
When they realize it, yeah. Or we’re talking about an experienced elk hunter with a .300 w/m hunting rifle, who is used to shooting at elk at 500-600m. That would be considered a mature target, but an ICE trooper 100m away is “sniper” stuff.
Here I will sound like a conventional American Gun Nut(tm) which I am/used to be. Guns are a cool problem and I used to approach shooting like a practitioner might approach Kyudo (Japanese archery) – it’s a relaxation and mental discipline exercise that has a very strong feedback loop. And any self-respecting gun nut will point out that an AR-15oid is, basically, a .22. OK, it’s .223. but that’s basically a .22. It’s a light high-velocity round that is great for spraying around in a jungle but it’s very light, so it drops off in power pretty fast. I.e.: it drops below the speed of sound around 300-400m out. That’s why the training emphasizes that 300m is nearing the edge of effectiveness. Of course that can be remedied by using various bullets and powder and whatnot, but the summary is: “why?” I remember the range instructors telling us a .223 couldn’t even penetrate a helmet at 300m. Well, shit, what are we supposed to use, harsh language?
Yet, eighteen months on, and in reference to an event where an adult using an assault rifle fired eight rounds “at” a target just 130 metres away and DIDN’T kill it, the Wikipedia entry for it still calls it an “assassination attempt”, as though he wasn’t deliberately aiming instead for the two people he DID kill.
I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere that if he had been using a hunting rifle, champagne sales would have gone through the roof. One effect of the semiautomatic “assault rifle” is that troops nowadays are taught to put a bunch of bullets downrange and hope something dies. I listened to the audio of the event a few times and it sounds to me like the sniper overwatch team was already getting a bead on him – the attacking shot and the secret service outbound shots are very close together. Sounds like 3, then a response of 3. If the kid hadn’t been thinking “I have a 30 round clip” maybe he’d have shot better. Semiautomatics encourage that, and a little .223 doesn’t kick your sight picture around enough to make you learn how to manage recoil. Assuming the kid was the shooter (I think so, it had all the hallmarks of a dumb kid shooting) it looks a lot like the kid was a Call of Duty player: he took a head shot – the classic mistake from Day of The Jackal – if you’re using a heavy game rifle and a scope, you only get one shot and that steadies you and maybe makes you think. Serious People(tm) aim center mass because there’s nothing in the central chest axis that likes a bullet, and heads are the part that bobs around unexpectedly. That is exactly what happened in Butler. He had one shot, didn’t realize it, and threw two more away once it was too late and the secret service team were putting the crosshairs on him. The guy who shot Charlie Kirk: same deal – that was a lucky miss. Nobody aims at a neck. My guess is that guy was also taking a head shot and also missed. Pff, kids these days.
Sazz used to shoot with a Savage Model 100 chambered in .300 Win/magnum. Bolt action single shot, capable of engaging from far enough out that you don’t have to worry about target movement – if they are moving, you don’t shoot at them. Simple.
But in a country where there are as many guns as people, you’d think there’d be enough gun-fondlers in the media for at least ONE of them to look at those numbers (range: 130 metres; rounds fired: 8; number of kill shots on highest-value target: zero) and go “hang the fuck ON”
See, my reaction is more “(sigh) kids these days.” I’m more inclined to dismiss the whole thing as a MAGA dipshit being a dipshit. These MAGA dipshits are not Serious People(tm) I do know some of those, but they’re serious enough to realize that you only get one shot, and you need to bring a whole different attitude. I see no sign of that attitude appearing, because the people with that attitude are not likely to just go jumping into politics like that. Which, I suppose, contradicts my sometime comment that they are often sociopaths, who tend to be disorganized and more focused on their own motives than getting things done. All the shooter has to think is “oo I’m going to be SO FAMOUS!” and they mis-read the target’s rythym at the moment. [In The Day of The Jackal we are supposed to infer that the shooter is British because anyone who really knew their Frenchies would know they do the double air-kiss not a single one. A serious shooter aims center chest and doesn’t use a .22]
I’m curious what you think went down here, because my read is that that was no assassination attempt, because it’s not credible to me that at that range, in those lighting conditions and weather, that anyone not HEAVILY incentivised to miss would even be capable of doing so.
I think it was an assassination attempt, just amateur work by someone who has played too much Call of Duty and is not disassociated enough to kill someone without a bit of adrenaline hitting them.
I should not admit this, but one time I went to the range to see how it felt to shoot with a big dose of adrenaline in me. Me and my buddy Mike simulated this with a dog shock-training collar on my ankle, that Mike controlled. We were on the 200m bench. I did miss a shot, but that made me realize that the only way to do this was to disassociate enough that a shock (they’re just little shocks) was just a signal to ride out and take the shot as soon as the shock stopped.
Anyhow, I think it’s all a matter of low quality American Gun Nuts(tm) who are more interested in smack-talking on bookagram, and playing Call of Duty than thinking seriously about killing someone. I don’t think it’s hard or takes a lot of preparation, but it maybe takes a little bit. By the way, proper sniper doctrine is not to climb on the fucking roof and look highly suspicious it’s to find an interior angle and set up back from your window, or whatever, completely remove the glass pane you’ll be shooting through so it’s not obvious, and set up on a couple of tables or something about 10-15 feet back into the room. If the kid had been serious he’d have known that. Hell, it’s even in The Day of The Jackal and Lee Harvey Oswald got it right, too. Proper doctrine would be to saw a lock out with an angle grinder the night before, scout your position, etc., then if you get caught by the advance team you don’t get shot – you were just breaking and entering, etc. Sure, they’ll find the rifle, but you won’t get full of holes. I’d assume the Secret Service has advance teams check buildings a day or two before and then quick check them the day of but I don’t know how serious the Secret Service is, anymore. They have only had to deal with one sharpshooter, ever, and they failed.
I do think it was an assassination attempt, and I don’t feel a need to hypothesize it was anything more than what it appears to be. There’s one huge problem with thinking that was a set-up: from the shooter’s position I’d bet a substantial amount of money that I’d make the shot so the conspiracy shooter had to almost make the shot without accidentally blowing a hole in the president. That bullet looked like it was within an inch of the buckethead. I would not wager any amount of money, let alone my life, that I could credibly miss that shot by such a narrow margin. Especially since buckethead moved right when the kid took his shot. To believe that was part of a conspiracy we need someone who is such a good shot that they are willing to miss so narrowly and to get their face blown off seconds later. It is uncredible that the CIA, for example, could pay me to fake trying the shot but to miss because you don’t have to watch a lot of 80s spy flicks to know that you’d be “Oswalded” immediately. But that plot device has serious flaws – for one thing, what if the guy that accepts the job actually wants to shoot buckethead and is enough of a Serious Person to pick a different sniper hide and bring their own rifle. Some CIA guy says “here’s $100,000 and the rifle you’re going to use” that money’s not going anywhere near anything or anyone I care about, and I’d show up on the day with my trusty .308 Sako, which I know like the back of my hand, and some of my old Lake City boattails that I calibrated the rifle to, back in the 90s. And the CIA would know that, too, so they’d be trying to recruit someone skilled but stupid. It doesn’t scan.
snarkhuntr@#3:
I think you’re woefully misunderstanding what Americans actually do with the guns they own. Mostly they don’t actually ‘practice’ or ‘train’ with them. Some Americans ‘go to the range’ and shoot their guns from time to time, but very rarely with any kind of discipline or focus. They just blast off whatever rounds they have, hit whatever they hit, and go home satisfied. I’d bet you good money that more than 90% of the long guns in the US have never been fired at ranges exceeding 100m in any kind of rigorous or disciplined fashion
Exactly. When I lived in Woodbine, I was 10 minutes from a public range, so my buddy Mike and I got in a habit of going to the range on sunday mornings when all the christians were away. We did it in the spirit of idle competition between us, but also because here I had this fine rifle and a truly magnificent scope (a Kahles/Swarovski 10x mildot) and shooting the damn thing was the shooting equivalent of driving a Ferrari Enzo. I had 2000rd of Lake City from the same batch, which is how you are supposed to do it, broke the rifle in right, calibrated it properly, and annoyingly Mike could regularly fire .5″ groups with the thing at 200M while I was around .75″ and frustrated by that. Mike and I have both occasionally crossed the philosophical path of Bushido and treated the whole thing like a zen archery session except for one time when we were out there and the local state police tactical team noisily showed up and set up on the two benches next to us. They had some MacMillanized Remington 700s that probably cost twice what my gear cost, but it wasn’t as good. At one of the breaks the cop spotter looks at Mike’s target and says “holy shit what is that rifle?” I’m scoping their target and Mike says, “it’s my buddy’s.” They ask him what he does, “microbiologist.” Meanwhile, with the perfectly good rifle they have, they’re shooting 5″ shot groups. So I asked if there was something wrong with their scope mount… Oh, yeah. They hated me. Fuck them – sucking ass is its own reward.
I still have 250 rounds left from the initial 2 cases of ammo I bought, and since then got a half case of Sellier and Bellot subsonic .308. I thoroughly expect to never have to use that sort of stuff but if the rednecks get their war, who knows? So, about 1700 rounds through that barrel; it’s nicely broken in. When I moved from Maryland to the country, I stopped shooting as much because Mike wasn’t there. I actually own a 300M line that ends in a berm, and I set some old dishes up on the ridge and vaporised a few of them, but you gotta have a buddy to cheer when you do stuff like that, or I just feel a little lonely and sad. On the rare occasion there are ATVers tearing around the property (this has happened) or hunters stalking in view of my bedroom (this happens scarily often) and I take a rifle in the truck, I take my Belgian-made FN/FAL; it has the gravitas of an anti-tank gun.
I did a posting on my old ranum.com site many years ago and haven’t updated it or crossposted it here, mostly because FTB isn’t exactly Gun Nut Haven(tm). And, besides, I consider myself a former gun nut not an active gun nut. It is [ranum.com] if anyone cares. I think that it expresses attitudes that remain fairly consistent with what I just said above. There’s a little showing off. When I first moved up here, I did a little showing off for the benefit of the neighbors but then tailed it off.
At the height of MAGA, there were sometimes people talking about “killing all the defenseless liberals” and sometimes I’d wander over and ask them if they wanted to shoot some targets for money. Nobody ever took me up on it. See, out here the standard of marksmanship is “can hit a deer.” It’s not the kind of fast, definitive, shooting you do in the military.
That guy in the first picture, his stance sucks.
I did a search. DuckDuckGo came up empty, and Google had only one hit for the term
“tactical ikebana”
@22. Marcus Ranum : Thanks for that, appreciated. Saw The Last Samurai as a kid and enjoyed it many decades ago -like a lot of things I enjoyed then with less crtical eyes, it hasn’t aged all that well and doesn’t stand up to that much later scrutiny and reflection. (Cough, Orson Scott card’s Ender series, cough.)
@mjr,26: you’ve convinced me. Thank you.
Kids these days.
Reginald Selkirk@#29:
I did a search. DuckDuckGo came up empty, and Google had only one hit for the term
“tactical ikebana”
Genius!
I thought I’d ask a couple of different AI models and see what came out the other end. One of them gave me a really good photoreal picture of someone working on perfectly normal looking ikebana in what appeared to be a Starbucks’.
This is Google’s “nano banana” model:
chigau@#28:
That guy in the first picture, his stance sucks.
It sure does!