Somebody has a serious death wish in my humble opinion!! Grumpy
Category: A Victory!
The counterpoise trebuchet has seen military service for centuries.Public domain.
I bought my first putt-putt BB gun at age seven. I went hunting not because I liked deer meat but because I just enjoyed walking through the woods carrying a gun with my dad. I bought my first AR-15 in the 10th grade, and my favorite spud gun will pass for a 57mm recoilless rifle in dim light. Once I took physics in high school, all I wanted to do was calculate how cannonballs behaved when fired. I’ve got the gun nerd gene.
My best friend Jason and I once got on a wicked trebuchet kick. A trebuchet is a subset of the catapult. A traditional catapult is a brute force machine wherein the power of a spring, in this case a flexible shaft, is used to throw stuff. By contrast, the trebuchet is so much more elegant.
A counterpoise trebuchet is an amazingly elegant machine.
Public domain.
Technical Stuff
The counterpoise trebuchet was first used in the 12th century. This was a sort of medieval siege engine that used power stored up in a counterweight to fling a projectile. While the archetypal treb ammo was typically rough-hewn stone balls, they could also throw incendiary payloads and ghastly stuff like dead, diseased animals.
A counterpoise trebuchet is basically a big lever mounted on a frame. The shorter end supports the counterweight. The longer arm sports a rope sling on the end that is timed to deploy at just the right moment to maximize mechanical advantage.
Traditional trebuchets were most commonly constructed outside of a fortified town. In fact, once erected, the azimuth of fire was fixed. Adjusting the sling length, counterweight, mass of the projectile, and geometry of the release hook could fine-tune the range.
Ancient sieges were most typically tedious, drawn-out affairs. The attacking army would encamp around a castle or city and then build the siege engines as necessary. The machines were then dismantled or burned once the operation was complete.
Jason and I built several of these machines. The smallest sits on a desktop and throws BBs across the room. One of them is about the size of a toaster oven and chucks marbles. The waist-high version uses bricks for a counterweight and will throw a baseball about a hundred feet.
It is shockingly accurate. You can catch a baseball, keep your gloved hand in exactly the same spot, and catch the next ball without moving. The largest of the lot sported a 12-foot throwing arm and a 400-pound counterweight. That monster would fire a 5-pound bag of flour into the next time zone. That particular projectile rendered a lovely white explosion on impact. It would throw a softball even farther.
It takes a special kind of guy to climb into fake Roman armor
he made in his workshop and parade around in public with a
massive DIY medieval siege engine. Specifically, it takes the
really nerdy sort.
Showtime
It’s tough to be as weird as I am without drawing a crowd. As a result, Jason and I were invited each year by the Ole Miss School of Engineering to kick off their statewide high school trebuchet competition. Teams from across the state build trebs and then come together in the Vaught-Hemingway Football Stadium to see whose machine performs the best. As ours was hugely bigger, we were the warmup act.
In keeping with the gravitas of the moment, my buddy went as a crusader while I was a Roman legionary. My kids and I made my lorica segmentata Roman armor out of roofing flashing as a homeschool project. I have skinny legs. I looked like Big Bird out trolling for SweeTarts on Halloween, but I still just ate it up. I’ve always been cool that way.
And then, after several years of this, it all stopped. One teeny trivial close call, and my buddy and I never got invited back. Honestly, it could have happened to anybody.
The one thing the University of Mississippi reveres beyond all else has got to be the jumbotron. This gigantic monstrosity is about the size of a skyscraper and adorns one complete end of the massive football stadium. It is the holy altar employed during the pagan rituals that are SEC football games. There is literally no telling what that ghastly thing cost.
We set up the treb in the end zone, a not-insubstantial undertaking considering its size and mass, and got a couple of hundred little mini nerds all gathered around. Once we got the massive throwing arm cocked and the softball in place in the sling, we got a volunteer to snatch the lanyard. When this thing goes off, you can feel the earth move. Seismographs in Nevada record the event. Everything performed exactly as designed. Our leviathan medieval siege engine launched our softball at, conservatively, 5,000 feet per second … straight at the jumbotron on the far end of the stadium.
The crowd held its collective breath. The administrators in attendance representing the engineering school actually briefly died. And then the softball impacted the cheap seats in the student section, maybe five feet beneath the jumbotron. No harm, no foul …
All involved had a great time, though we were forbidden from firing our big treb a second time. We looked like idiots, and the kids learned some things. Inexplicably, the following year, we just didn’t get the email invitation to come back. It’s likely all just as well. I wasn’t getting any better looking in that DIY Roman legionary getup.
Police in New York want the legal ability to seize firearms during a domestic violence call – even if no arrests were made. However, instead of going through normal legal channels and obtaining a search warrant or court order, police just want the legal ability to take the guns on their own.
New York State lawmakers plan to reintroduce a bill during the next legislative session that will go farther than the state’s Safe Homes Act of 2020, which allows officers to seize firearms found during a consensual search when police respond to a domestic dispute.
New York State Senator Peter Harckham, a Democrat from Westchester County, has sponsored a bill that would
“mandate” officers to confiscate all firearms left out in the open during a domestic call.
“This is not gun control, this is gun safety; and this is domestic safety,” the senator told Spectrum News. “This is keeping the victims of domestic violence alive. We had two fatalities through domestic violence and firearms in my district in the last month. This is very real. This is very deadly and this is not a permanent seizure.”
Senator Harckham’s bill would allow police to keep the seized weapons for five days – most likely to seek restraining orders or other legal options – before returning them to their rightful owners. Also, police would likely extend this five-day time limit as needed.
Tom King, president of New York State’s Rifle & Pistol Association, balked loudly about the new bill.
“No person shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law,” King told the reporters. “That means a search warrant or an order from a judge to confiscate the firearms, and they’re doing this without that.”
King pointed out the more than 100 New Yorkers who had firearms seized under the state’s newly expanded red-flag law. This group contacted King’s nonprofit seeking help getting their guns back. Some have already paid more than $10,000 in legal expenses, King said.
Takeaways
The main problem with the new bill is that it offers police yet another illegal mechanism to seize someone’s guns.
Our federal law does not allow law enforcement to go traipsing through someone’s home looking for firearms that were never used in a crime, which they will then seize for no evidentiary value.
These types of laws are passed solely for one reason – harassment. They want to harass gun owners. They want gun owners temporarily disarmed and then forced to make several trips to the police station to get their property returned, at great cost, too. Don’t forget that.
Today, gun owners have fewer rights in places like New York than they do in free states. This new bill will only make it worse.
Article courtesy of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project. Click here to support the project.
Background checks in Washington State are “on hold” while computer techs are trying to fix some system “infiltration,” which has created problems with the entire court system.The October, 2024 National Instant background Check System (NICS) numbers are in. They do not show a significant difference in the trends. Both October gun sales and NICS checks are the fifth highest for October, which has been a consistent theme in 2024. While a bit lower than in 2023, the gun sales and NICS checks are still high by historical standards.
Gun sales for October 2024 are estimated at 1.26 million firearms, about 94% of what they were in October 2023. NICS checks for October were about 5% higher than they were in 2023. Both NICS checks and NICS-related gun sales are only somewhat correlated. NICS checks are used for purposes other than gun sales. States’ policies regarding NICS change. Some states require high numbers of NICS checks unrelated to gun sales. Most states do not.
The bar graph shows gun sales by type for months in 2023 (lines) and 2024 (bars). It is obvious the trend for 2024 is a bit less than for 2023, except for August. August gun sales probably increased because of the assassination attempt on the former president and then-candidate for president, Donald Trump.
The election of 2024 confirmed that former President Trump would be the future President Trump. He is only the second president to perform this feat in non-consecutive terms. As of this writing, there has been very little unrest in the forms of protests or riots against the second Trump term. If this trend continues, firearm sales are likely to slump as fears of civil unrest wane. If President Trump can succeed in bringing an end to the Ukraine-Russia conflict, a slump in firearm sales is almost certain.
The supply of firearms has been very close to demand in the last few months. This is clear because of falling prices for many popular models. This is a golden age for the affordability of firearms and ammunition. Prices have occasionally been lower when surplus firearms have been offered below the cost of production. If the Ukraine war is ended, expect ammunition prices to fall as more ammunition production goes into supplies for civilian sales instead of war consumption.
Domestic tranquility is not certain. Domestic unrest may increase significantly as the inauguration approaches and during a second Trump term. The popular vote mandate and the overall landslide of the 2024 elections in favor of conservatives weigh against domestic unrest. We will know in a couple of months.
November and December tend to be the highest months for gun sales. Sales should increase in the next two months. If current trends hold, November and December 2024 sales will be lower than November and December 2023 sales.
Several Second Amendment cases are pending in the courts. The case out of Maryland on whether a ban on semi-automatic rifles, known by the more deceptive and political term of “assault weapons,” could be heard next year. There are challenges against “gun free zones” and against bans on carry by states against residents of other states.