Categories
I was six feet tall and 163 lbs. without a gram of extraneous body fat. Though I didn’t enjoy it, I did a weekly 10k run with my mates in boots with a rucksack and M16. I was in the best physical condition of my life and believed myself to be both bulletproof and immortal. Then I met the Pig.
A proper 15-mile forced march was about the hardest thing I have ever done. On this particularly fateful day, I don’t recall whose dog I had inadvertently kicked to deserve what happened to me. This was, however, the day I got tagged to lug the Pig.
The “Pig” was the M60 belt-fed General Purpose Machine Gun (GPMG). Back in my day, we used M60’s as SAWs (Squad Automatic Weapons). Nowadays, our 5.56mm SAWs are relatively lightweight, portable and mean. By contrast, the Pig weighed 23 lbs. empty and fired a 7.62x51mm round the size of my little finger. The Pig would cut through walls, chew through ceilings, ventilate cars and reach out to truly serious ranges. It was, however, indeed still a pig. At the end of that horrible road march, I thought I’d died.
Origin Story
The M60 GPMG wanted so badly to be awesome. Rising from the ashes of World War II, the M60 reflected the U.S. Army’s effort at developing a truly state-of-the-art light machine gun. We fought the Second World War with the Browning M1919A4. This beast ran like the Energizer bunny, but it weighed 31 lbs. and was a veritable mass of sharp corners. The M1919A4 was also designed to be fired off of a separate M2 tripod, an awkward piece of kit that itself weighed another 16 pounds. The subsequent M1919A6 tried to morph the gun into something more portable, but it was yet a pound heavier. We could do better.
The M60 began life as the experimental T44. In what has got to be the coolest job in the history of jobs, American firearms engineers took the belt-fed mechanism from a captured German MG42 and grafted it onto the action of an FG42 paratroop rifle. The resulting frankengun served as the basis for the M60 action.
The M60 orbited around a stamped steel receiver for both economy and weight management. The Germans had shown the world with their MG42 that you could indeed stamp out a GPMG that was rugged enough to thrive on the modern battlefield. Though M60 receivers were ultimately found to stretch a bit, this part of the design performed fairly well.
The M60 featured a gas piston-driven action that fed ammunition in M13 disintegrating links solely from the left. The gun fired from the open bolt and was exceptionally simple to operate. Lock the bolt to the rear, put the gun on safe, open the top cover, and place the ammunition belt in the feedway link side up or “brass to the grass.” Close the top cover, point the gun at something you dislike, flick the safety off, and squeeze. Repeat as necessary. As seems always to be the case, however, the devil was in the details.
The M60 was an air-cooled design intended for sustained fire applications. Running lots of belt-fed rounds through a machinegun creates astronomical amounts of extraneous heat. Getting rid of all that thermal energy is the Achilles heel of any sustained fire weapon system. The generally accepted solution on a gun like the M60 is a quick change barrel system.
You can cut spirals or flutes into a barrel to increase its surface area and subsequently its capacity to dissipate heat. However, if you want this thing to shoot for a while you need mass. Making your barrels heavy is one of the reasons the Pig and I got along so poorly that torrid afternoon at Fort Benning. Certain aspects of the M60’s design were just fatally flawed.
The bipod on the M60 was located at the far end of the gun. This location optimized stability and control. However, in the case of the Pig, this meant that every spare barrel had its own dedicated bipod. For the sorts of guys who might break the handles off of their toothbrushes to help conserve weight on a long patrol, any extraneous mass was the unforgiveable sin.
Additionally, certain components of the M60 gas system had an annoying tendency to come apart at high round counts. As a result, the gas cylinders on our guns were always held together with safety wire. In practice that was not a particularly onerous problem, but it didn’t inspire confidence.
Swapping barrels on the Pig was indeed fast and intuitive. Lock the bolt back, throw the barrel release lever, snatch out the barrel using the handy but heavy carrying handle, and lock a fresh tube in place. Easy peasy.
Variations
The M60 was intended from the outset to be everything for everybody. Uncle Sam wanted one gun that could serve in a variety of roles. In the final analysis, there were only three versions that saw widespread service back in my day.
The standard ground gun featured a rubber-coated steel handguard and buttstock with a folding shoulder rest. This weapon served in most conventional roles to include vehicle mounts. In Vietnam, particularly early in the war, helicopter door gunners frequently hung a standard M60 from a bungee cord and used it for suppressive fire. Innovative gunners sometimes chopped the barrels short or affixed a spare pistol grip to the forearm with pipe clamps. It was a common practice to wire a C-ration can to the left aspect of the feed tray to enhance feeding.
The M60C was used in fixed mounts aboard helicopter gunships, most typically in dual fixtures on each side of the aircraft. The C-model was hydraulically charged and electrically fired via solenoid. The C-model guns used the same basic chassis as the ground guns. However, their barrels lacked bipods, front sights, and carrying handles.
The M60D was the standardized pintle-mounted aerial version of the weapon. The D-model dispensed with the forearm and included a spade grip with twin ring triggers in lieu of the buttstock assembly. The M60D included a folding ring sight as well. The barrels on our D-models still carried their own bipods so you could use the gun on the ground in a crisis.
Reliability
I did not have a homogeneously positive experience with the M60. Most of the guns I was issued seemed fairly finicky. We trained to fire five to eight-round bursts and remain ever mindful of barrel heat. I recall having to fiddle with the guns more than I should have to keep them running, particularly in an austere environment.
I was once signed for twenty-four D-model M60s to be used as door guns on my tactical aircraft. Despite being spotlessly maintained and perfectly lubricated there never seemed to be more than about six that really ran well. Failures in training tended to diminish confidence in the weapons. Given that the mission was to provide suppressive fire going into and out of hostile landing zones that always seemed a wee bit disturbing.
Practical Tactical
When the Pig ran, it ran well. The sedate 550-rpm rate of fire encouraged ammunition efficiency, and the heavy .30-caliber chambering carried plenty of downrange thump. Running the gun was both fun and exhilarating. Humping it, however, particularly for a skinny guy like me, not so much.
Running a belt-fed machinegun out of a moving helicopter is an incomparable rush. It also embodies a fair amount of unexpected physics. When the aircraft is in forward flight and the guns fired out the sides each screaming bullet becomes its own little flying machine.
The 22” barrel on the M60 is rifled one turn in twelve inches. The bullet leaves the gun’s barrel at around 2,800 fps. That means it has a rotational velocity of 2,800 revolutions per second or about 168,000 rpm. The bullet turns clockwise as viewed from the firer. When fired in forward flight out the right side of the aircraft the airflow across the bullet creates a low pressure area on the top that actually draws the projectile upward. Smarter folks than I call this the Magnus Effect. On the left side of the aircraft this low pressure area is formed underneath the bullet and pulls it down.
The end result is that to hit a target on the right the gunner aims intentionally beneath it and lets the bullets fly up to impact. The opposite is true on the left with the bullets plunging precipitously toward the ground. The practical effect when doing this for real firing tracers is frankly surreal.
Denouement
The M60 will forever be associated with Sylvester Stallone and John Rambo. The 1982 action movie First Blood established its own film genre. A fun fact is that Stallone co-wrote the screenplays for First Blood as well as the next four sequels.
In the first film, Stallone’s put-upon Vietnam-era Special Forces veteran character eventually takes up an M60 and uses it to shoot the bejeebers out of the small town of Hope, Washington. Along the way, Rambo even runs his M60 one-handed, albeit on a sling. Just punch “First Blood M60” into YouTube if you haven’t seen the juicy bits. However, should this be the case I sure wouldn’t admit that to any of your guy friends.
For the most part, the M60 has been supplanted in U.S. military service by the M240-series of belt-fed guns. Upgraded versions like the M60E6 still soldier on in certain select units, however. Despite its warts, the Pig yet remains one of the coolest looking automatic weapons ever contrived.
Categories
MG34 – General Purpose Machine Gun
Categories
Armed in 2026
The New Hampshire Campus Carry Bill, HB1793, appears to have been killed by amendments and the Senate’s unwillingness to compromise with a conference committee. As reported on AmmoLand, the bill looked to have a bright future earlier this year.
HB 1793 had two major provisions. First, it removed the special power of public institutions of higher learning, mostly colleges and universities, to infringe on the exercise of Second Amendment rights in New Hampshire. Second, the Bill made clear that no special permit would be required to exercise those rights on campus. The legislature had the power to do this because the institutions of higher learning were public, not private institutions.
To enforce rights protected by the bill, individuals could sue institutions and individuals for violating those rights, as can be done with other constitutional rights. The bill had significant support. It passed the New Hampshire House on the fifth of February, 2026, 188 to 165, with 11 not voting and 30 absent. It was then sent to the New Hampshire Senate. On May 14, 2026, the Senate passed the bill with a “poison pill” amendment, which eliminated the two provisions above, except for university professors. The House countered by not accepting the Senate amendment but calling for a conference committee to work out a compromise.
On May 21, the Senate rejected the request for a conference committee on a voice vote, effectively killing the bill.
Through long observation, I’ve learned institutions of higher learning have influence with state legislatures far beyond what would be expected from the size of their staff and student bodies. Those institutions have moved further and further to the political left in the last 50 years.
The logic of HB1793 was impeccable: Allow people on institutions of higher learning to exercise rights protected by the Second Amendment which they already could exercise when they stepped across the campus boundary line.
The emotional arguments against the bill did not hold up against the facts. Considerable testimony and facts were presented in the legislative debates. New Hampshire already has Constitutional Carry.
Universities and colleges have long ago become centers of power of the political left and, particularly, Progressive ideology. The rights protected by the Second Amendment are intensely rejected by Progressive ideology. Hostility to the Second Amendment is part of Progressive DNA. Progressives consider limits on governmental power to be irrational and evil.
A strong lobbying campaign was conducted against HB1793. It was enough to swing the votes to kill the Bill in the Senate. This will not be the end of efforts to restore constitutional rights to students on campus in New Hampshire. It is the end of a promising bill in the New Hampshire legislature this year.
Representative Samuel Farrington is the primary sponsor of the bill. He is one of the youngest members of the New Hampshire General Assembly. He showed himself to be energetic, capable, and strategic. The bill came very close to passage. The fight for the bill accomplished a great deal of education about campus carry in New Hampshire.
About Dean Weingarten:
Dean Weingarten has been a peace officer, a military officer, was on the University of Wisconsin Pistol Team for four years, and was first certified to teach firearms safety in 1973. He taught the Arizona concealed carry course for fifteen years until the goal of Constitutional Carry was attained. He has degrees in meteorology and mining engineering, and retired from the Department of Defense after a 30 year career in Army Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation.
In 2001, a Los Angeles Times op-ed laid out what the author believed was the definitive limit of Second Amendment protection. American citizens, the author wrote, had the constitutional right to own flintlock muskets and pistols — and nothing more.
“I believe that the framers of the Bill of Rights intended that the right of every American citizen to bear flintlock muskets and pistols should not be infringed,” the author wrote. “I believe that American citizens today — without fingerprinting, without a license, without a background check — ought to be able to own as many flintlock muskets and pistols as they want. If they want to fill up their garages with them, that should be nobody’s business but their own.”
The piece was satirical in framing but earnest in substance. The argument — that the Second Amendment’s “arms” should be limited to 18th-century weapons technology — was a serious gun-control position in 2001 and remained so for the next two decades. Variations on it appeared regularly in mainstream commentary, in academic legal arguments, and occasionally in judicial opinions.
Twenty-five years later, the position has reversed. The Associated Press published a piece on May 14 taking the opposite stance: that the lack of regulatory infrastructure around muzzleloading firearms is itself a problem requiring legislative attention.
TTAG covered the AP story and the underlying antique firearm regulatory framework at length last week. The piece you’re reading isn’t about that legal landscape — it’s about how dramatically the gun-control commentariat’s position has shifted on what the Second Amendment supposedly does and doesn’t protect.
The 2001 framing
The LA Times op-ed represented what was, at the time, an emerging strategic frame in gun-control commentary. The argument went: the Second Amendment was written in 1791, when “arms” meant flintlocks. The framers could not have anticipated cartridge firearms, semiautomatic weapons, or modern firearms technology. Therefore the Constitution’s protection should be limited to what existed in 1791, leaving all subsequent firearms technology — meaning effectively every firearm in commercial production today — outside Second Amendment protection and available for regulation or prohibition.
The argument has obvious legal problems. The First Amendment doesn’t apply only to quill-and-parchment newspapers. The Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply only to physical searches of 18th-century homes. The Constitution’s protections extend to modern technology in every other context. But the flintlock-only framing had rhetorical power, and gun-control advocates leaned on it heavily through the early 2000s.
It was also a frame that gun-rights advocates were happy to engage with — because the implicit concession was clear: even if we accept the absurd premise, flintlocks themselves were absolutely protected.
The 1968 Gun Control Act exempts antique firearms manufactured before 1898 from federal firearms regulation entirely, treating modern replicas of flintlocks and percussion-cap firearms similarly. The flintlock framing was rhetorical losing ground for gun-control advocates: even the maximally restrictive reading of “arms” still protected the flintlock.
The 2026 reversal
Fast-forward 25 years. The AP article from May 14 takes the position that flintlock and muzzleloader exemptions are themselves a problem.
“With 165 grains of black powder in the barrel, a .75-caliber Brown Bess flintlock musket like the ones the redcoats carried in 1776 can hurl a lead ball at a velocity of around 1,000 feet per second,” AP author Kevin Breed wrote. “Imagine what that can do to a human body. Now, imagine that it’s almost completely exempt from gun regulations.”
The piece walks through the federal antique firearm exemption, discusses state-level variation, and frames the regulatory gap as a problem requiring attention. Maryland’s Shadé’s Law — passed after a convicted offender killed his ex-girlfriend with a cap-and-ball revolver in 2017 — gets cited as the appropriate policy response that should be replicated elsewhere.
The contrast with the 2001 LA Times framing is stark. In 2001, the gun-control commentariat’s position was that the Second Amendment protected only flintlocks. In 2026, the position is that flintlocks too require regulation. The Second Amendment-protected category that gun-control advocates were willing to concede 25 years ago has now disappeared entirely.
What this signals
The reversal isn’t an accident, and it’s not an inconsistency the gun-control commentariat is going to publicly acknowledge. It reflects two strategic developments over the past quarter century.
First, the post-Heller and post-Bruen legal landscape made the “flintlock-only” framing untenable as a serious legal argument. The Supreme Court in Heller (2008) explicitly rejected the framing, noting that the Second Amendment protects “arms” in common civilian use, including modern firearms. Bruen (2022) reinforced this with the historical-tradition test. The flintlock-only position had to be abandoned not because gun-control advocates changed their minds, but because the Court closed the door on the legal theory.
Second, with the flintlock-only fallback closed off, gun-control advocates needed a new framework for regulating firearms. The current approach — accepting that Bruen requires historical analogs while pushing back the perimeter of what’s protected — naturally extends to argue that even the formerly-protected flintlocks should be regulated where state legislators can manage it.
In other words: the position 25 years ago was “the Second Amendment only protects flintlocks.” The position today is “even flintlocks should be regulated.” The constitutional carve-out the gun-control commentariat was willing to concede in 2001 has been quietly eliminated from their public framing.
Whether anyone in gun-control commentary will publicly engage with this reversal remains to be seen. Charlton Heston’s famous “from my cold, dead hands” flintlock moment at the 2000 NRA convention drew mockery in the AP article — Breed concluded that Heston “needn’t have worried” because the flintlock was never threatened.
The 2001 LA Times op-ed and the 2026 AP article, read together, suggest Heston was reading the trajectory more accurately than his critics realized.